Triggered

Somebody pointed me to a research article about how many app developers fail to comply with the GDPR and data requests in general.

The sender suggested that I could use it in marketing for Nextcloud.

I appreciate such help, obviously, and often such articles are interesting. This one - I read it for a while but honestly, while I think it is good this is researched and attention is paid for it, I neither find the results very surprising NOR that horrible.

What, a privacy advocate NOT deeply upset at bad privacy practices?

Sir, yes, sir. You see, while the letter of the law is important, I think that intentions also are extremely important. Let me explain.

Not all GDPR violations are made equal

If you or your small business develops an app or runs a website to sell a product and you simply and honestly try to do a decent job while being a decent person, the GDPR is a big burden. Yes, the GDPR is good, giving people important rights. But if you run a mailing list on your local pottery sales website, with no intention other than to inform your prospective customers and followers of what you're up to, it can be a burden to have people send you GDPR takedown and 'delete me' requests instead of just having them, you know - unsubscribe via the link under your newsletter!

The goal of the GDPR, and of my personal privacy concerns, isn't at all related to such a business. If anything, their additional hardship (and we at Nextcloud have this issue too) is at best a by product of the goal. That byproduct isn't all bad - we all make mistakes, and being more aware of privacy is good, even for small businesses. The GDPR has forced many small businesses to re-think how they deal with private data, and that isn't a bad thing at all. But it isn't the main benefit or goal of the GDPR in my eyes. There are big businesses who totally COULD do better but never bothered, and now the GDPR forces them to get their act together. While that's a real good thing, even THAT is not, in my opinion, what the GDPR is about.

Privacy violation as a business

You see, there are businesses who don't violate privacy of people by accident. Or even because it is convenient. There are businesses who do it as their core business model. You know who I'm talking about - Facebook, Google. To a lesser but still serious degree - Microsoft and yes, even Apple, though you can argue they are perhaps in the "side hustle" rather than "it's their primary revenue stream" category.

For these organizations, gathering your private data is their life blood. They exploit it in many ways - some sell it, which is in my opinion definitely among the most egregious 'options'. Others, like Google and Facebook, hoard but also aggressively protect your data - they don't want to leak it too much, they want to monetize it themselves! Of course, in the process of that, they often leak it anyway - think Cambridge Analytica - that was in no way an incident, hundreds of apps get your private data via Google, Facebook, Microsoft and others. But by and large, they want to keep that data to themselves so they can use it to offer services - targeted ads. Which in turn, of course, get abused sometimes too.

My issue with this business model, even without the outright sale of data, is two-fold.

Ads work better than you think

First, in principle - while people might feel ads don't effect them, there is a reason companies pay for them. They DO effect your behavior. Maybe not as much or in the way marketing departments think or hope, but the effect exists.

How bad is that? Depends, I guess. To some degree, it is of course entirely legitimate that companies have a way to present their product to people. But modern targeting does more, including allowing companies to charge specific people different prices, and of course a wide arrange of sometimes nasty psychological tricks is used. The example Facebook once gave to potential advertisers, of targeting an insecure youth "at their most vulnerable" with an ad is... rather disgusting.

This gets worse when we're not just talking about product ads but political ads, either from political countries or, of course, from foreign non-democratic adversaries trying to influence our freedoms in a rather direct and dangerous way. And again - this is more effective than most people realize or are willing to admit and has swayed elections already, making is all less free.

Centralization is bad

Second, there is simply a HUGE issue with all-our-eggs in one basket. Especial when that basket is in a foreign country and not protected by privacy and security laws compatible with those in your own country. Having a single point of failure, how well protected - is just not smart. Things WILL fail, always. Better have slightly more breaches that each are just a single provider, than one breach of all private data of everyone in a country...

And that's not even talking about the fact that this data helps these companies get incredibly huge and then allows them to suppress or kill competition (or just buy it) - think Amazon, Microsoft. These tech molochs are just plain bad because of many reasons. They are anti-competitive, which raises prices, decreases choice, and the much lower innovation-per-dollar they produce is of course a worse deal for society too. They are too easy to control by law enforcement and censorship, impacting our freedoms - even when they're not 'foreign' to you. Yes, it is harder to censor 50000 private servers than one Google server farm!

Triggered

 So, as you notice, this question triggered me. Not all privacy violations are equal. Intentions matter. As does market power. And the GDPR is not a golden bullet. It has downsides - compliance is often easier for big companies than small ones, a serious issue.

Luckily, our judicial system tends to look at the intentions behind law, and I would expect a judge to fine an organization heavier for truly bad business models than for honest mistakes. I hope I'm not too optimistic here.

From my side, I don't want to bang on people's head for mistakes. I want to attack and challenge bad business models and bad intentions. A local, small app maker who fails to respond quickly enough to GDPR requests - not my target. Facebook - yes.

And by the way. Maybe it doesn't need to be said to most of you, dear readers, but of course - our open source world is, I still believe, a huge part of solving this problem. KDE, openSUSE and other Linuxes and desktops - and of course Nextcloud, Mastodon, Matrix and other decentralized and distributed and self-hosted platforms. We have ways to go, but we're making progress!

As I concluded to the person who triggered me - I know, this is far too long a reply to what they said

But it triggered me ;-)

Best reply over twitter, (twitter.com/jospoortvliet) or so, this awful Google platform makes commenting nearly impossible. And I know, the irony, replying on twitter, and I still have not moved away from blogger.com... Some day, some day. When I find time.

3 alternative reasons why you should test Nextcloud 11 Beta

On the Nextcloud blog I just published about the beta for Nextcloud 11. The release will deliver many improvements and is worth checking out in itself, plus I put a nice clickbait-style title and gave three reasons to test it.

But I actually have some more reasons to test. You see, Nextcloud is one of the tools we need to keep our democracy working. As Frank notes on his home page:

"Privacy is the foundation of democracy"

And he is completely right. So, here are three different reasons why you should test (and help improve) Nextcloud:

1. The USA is making a massive swing towards even more spying

Obama has done nothing to curb the growth of the NSA and the scope of its operations. Secret laws spiked under his watch. Many of the folks about to be put in power by President-elect Trump favor more spying, including on US citizens, expansion of the NSA, a crackdown on whistleblowers and more. Trump's pick for CIA director calls for Snowden's execution. For what I can only guess must be giving proof of illegal government spying to dangerous terrorists like the Washington Post and the Guardian, who proceeded to win a Pulitzer prize by disclosing this information irresponsibly to the US public.

In general, as somebody who changes his stance on hugely important and complicated issues like torture in under an hour, it is impossible to predict what Trump will do with the most powerful spying agency in the world under his control, but his appreciation for dictatorial figures like Kim Jong Il and Putin gives plenty cause for concern.

2. Britain isn't doing much better

I wrote about the Snoopers' charter just some days ago - this piece of legislation goes further than any earlier piece of spying law. It allows not only passive spying but also actively hacking devices from citizens.

3. Nor is Europe

The UK is not alone. Since Snowden, Europe has complained a bit about the NSA but seems to simply follow suit, rather than doing anything about it. Germany is even introducing a bill that will allow spying on foreign journalists.

Help out!

So, how can you help? Well, test Nextcloud 11 Beta, obviously. Help others to use it, get them involved. But it goes beyond Nextcloud - promote the use of and help improve tools like Tor, Signal and others, or democracy is screwed.

Edit: updated the blog 

Get started with Nextcloud App development in 6 easy steps!

The brand new app scaffolding tool in our app store

Last night, Bernhard Posselt finished the app scaffold tool in the app store, making it easy to get up and running with app development. I was asked on twitter to blog about setting up a development environment, so... here goes.

What's simpler than downloading a zip file, extracting it and running a command in the resulting folder to get an Nextcloud server up on localhost for hacking?

Yes, it can be that simple, though it might require a few minor tweaks and you have to make sure to have all Nextcloud dependencies installed.

Note that this is useful if you want to develop an Nextcloud app. If you want to develop on the Nextcloud core, a git checkout is the way to go and you'll need some extra steps to get the dependencies in place, get started here. Feedback on this process is highly appreciated, especially if it comes with a pull request for our documentation of course ;-)

Step 1 and Two: Dependencies

• Install PHP and the modules mentioned here
  Your distro should make the installation easy. Try these:
  
  • openSUSE: zypper in php5 php5-ctype php5-curl php5-dom php5-fileinfo php5-gd php5-iconv php5-json php5-ldap php5-mbstring php5-openssl php5-pdo php5-pear php5-posix php5-sqlite php5-tokenizer php5-xmlreader php5-xmlwriter php5-zip php5-zlib
  • Debian: apt-get install php5 php5-json php5-gd php5-sqlite curl libcurl3 libcurl3-dev php5-curl php5-common php-xml-parser php5-ldap bzip2
• Make Nextcloud session management work under your own user account.
  Either change the path of php session files or chmod 777 the folder they are in, usually something like /var/lib/php (debian/SUSE) or /var/lib/php/session (Red Hat).

The Final Four Steps

• Download the latest Nextcloud zip file.
• Extract it in a folder where you want to get going.
• Enter the folder and execute: php -S localhost:5000
• Visit http://localhost:5000 in your browser

Nextcloud should present you with its installation steps! Give your username and password and you're up and running with SQLite.

Start with the app

Now you create a subfolder in the nextcloud/apps with the name of your app and put in a skeleton. You can generate an app skeleton really easy: use the scaffolding tool, part of our new app store for Nextcloud 11!

It's probably wise to now get going with the app development tutorial here. This isn't updated for the scaffolding tool yet, so you'll have a head start here. Be sure to check out the changelog, we try to make sure the latest changes are noted there so even if we didn't manage to fully update the tutorial, you can find out what will and won't work in the changelog. Also, be sure to update the links to get the latest dev doc - this all links to 11, once that is out it is probably better to directly target 12 and so on.

Help and feedback

Your input is very much welcome! If you run through these steps and get stuck somewhere, let me know and I'll update the documentation. Or, of course better still, do a pull request on the documentation right in github. You don't even have to do a full checkout, smaller fixes can easily be done in the web interface on github.

Last but not least, ask questions on our forums in the app dev channel or on IRC. Here is the Nextloud development IRC chat channel on freenode.net, also accessible via webchat.

Thanks, good luck, and have fun building Nextcloud apps!

Latest attacks on privacy...

With the EU (in this case France and Germany) gearing up for another attack on privacy I'm quite happy and proud to have been part of the release of Nextcloud 10!

Privacy

It is the usual story: we should disallow companies from using perfect end to end encryption and force them to insert backdoors against terrorists.

Not that it would help - that's been discussed extensively already but in short:

• If you have nothing to hide, you'll use a backdoored app and you're vulnerable to foreign (and your own) governments, terrorists (!), criminals and others who can abuse your data in more ways than you can imagine.
• If you have something to hide, you can use 1000 different tools to do so and there is nothing government can do about that so you won't use a backdoored app.
• And note that government has failed to even use fully unencrypted information to stop terrorist attacks so perhaps we should first see if they can actually get their act together there.

Now yes, backdooring all commonly used encryption apps will help a BIT, essentially only with the low level, common crime. So you might catch the dude who broke into your house and bragged about it to his friends over Whatsapp. You won't catch the terrorists plotting with Al Qaida (or whatever the terrorist organization du-jour) to blow up a train because they can simply get one of the many solutions out there to protect themselves.

Nor will you catch corrupt politicians or big companies doing nasty stuff, though I am quite certain the laws will be written in such a way that you can use them to go after people who actually try to expose such politicians or companies.

And I'm also quite certain companies will use this as an excuse to not implement proper protection in their products so you can continue to stop pacemakers remotely or disable the brakes in cars over the internet.

Generally, laws targeting encryption and terrorism do more to harm whistleblowing than terrorism and are thus promoting corruption and bad, unsecure products.

These laws will literally cost lives. Not save any.

And it is exactly why Frank started ownCloud and why we continue to develop that vision at Nextcloud. And keep developing new features, like the File Access Control app which can provide an extra protective layer around your data. I for one certainly can use that app and exactly in the way described in that blog! So much for 'enterprise only features'.


Get it and migrate today. You and your data deserve it!

Western Digital Labs and ownCloud

We published a blog post about a collaboration between WDLabs and ownCloud. WDLabs is, in their words, "a division of Western Digital focused on accelerating new solutions". I'd take that as "they look for more ways to sell hard drives" and they have been playing with some interesting stuff. One such thing is their PiDrive Kit. This kit includes a connector cable which powers both the harddrive and the Pi from one power supply, simplifying the setup. We're now working with WD Labs to build something from this starting point.

WD Labs, meet ownCloud

When they approached us a few weeks ago, they told us they had been toying with a more complete kit with bundled operating system based on berry boot. This lets you choose an OS on first boot and they had put together an image with ownCloud as one of the options. They thought it was really cool and asked if we felt the same and had any ideas of what we could do with it. Well, sure, I wrote not too long ago about What's holding ownCloud back and being able to offer potential users a plug-and-play device with ownCloud on it is something we'd love.

So did they. We quickly received a prototype of a kit with Berryboot and ownCloud on it as well as a case and a Pi included. After some more discussions, we developed a plan with which we hope to get some community help to make this happen.

We need your help

You have to know - this is not something ownCloud, Inc. is very much involved with. It simply is not a commercial endeavor - Inc. works for enterprise customers and we haven't found any of them yet running ownCloud on a Pi. So, while WD Labs will take care of the hardware and has committed themselves to doing a serious number of ownCloud branded devices complete with pre installed OS in the first quarter of next year, it will depend on our free time and community help to develop the OS.

And there's serious work to be done. Berryboot can be configured to boot a headless ownCloud but right now, to even boot, you have to connect a keyboard and monitor. And booting isn't even the issue - finding and configuring an IP and then connecting to the Pi is. And once you've done that, the system has to be configured to be accessible from outside so you can use the ownCloud clients on your mobile phone and laptop to always find and connect to your ownCloud and give you the ability to share with friends and family.

There are folks in our community who have experience with this, building our community VM for example (hi Daniel!) and we'd like to solicit their help. We have 10 prototypes to send out to people who want to help build this ready-to-go ownCloud, the blog has more details on how to get one. And if there is a lot of interest, we'll get more prototypes put together, though I think it'll be tight to get them out before Christmas.

Note that it is totally cool, even advantageous, to send in a proposal ad a team. Together you can get more done!!!

Of course - without this kit there is still a LOT you can do to help out and there is no reason to wait for us sending out anything! Help get a discussion started about what this should look like, how to get there and who does what. Subscribe to the developer mailing list and get started!

Future

Now we know the Raspberry Pi 2 isn't the very best device to run ownCloud on, in terms of performance. It won't run with 100 users, indeed, though it isn't too bad for a few users at home. But, aside from the fact that there is a lot of room for tuning (PHP 7, for one, should help a lot, see some stats here), we're not married to the Raspberry with a single hard drive. It is a popular device and thus a great place to start but WD Labs has already shown us prototypes using a Rasberry Pi Compute device and 2 hard drives and we could work with devices like the Banana Pi or more powerful boards, too. That won't happen immediately, it simply depends on how well the first version turns out and the interest from users.

That means it matters a lot now: can we make this work? I'll sure put a portion of my free time in this as I'm quite excited about it. You too?

BREAKING: Netneutrality more complex than you thought!

It was simple: netneutrality is good. Companies shouldn't be able to buy their way on a fast lane! That stifles innovation and competition and risks ruining the internet. Just like John Oliver explained it! But now the Brazilians are making things complicated.

Brazil was one of the first countries to introduce strong Net Neutrality laws, points for them. But now, Brazilian banks and local government are paying for the data bundles of users! Heresy! Why?

Well, many Brazilians can't afford a data bundle. Yet they need to bank, or order new passports. And it turns out that handling people in person at the office is more expensive for the banks and local governments than have them use an app on their phone. So, they made a deal with some local providers: users, even without a data bundle, can do their banking online and order their passports without paying. That seems like a win-win.

Zero rating, as this practice is called, exempts some services from from the data bundle - exactly what Brasil is doing. It is used widely in India ("internet.org") and in Chile it offered many people access to a limited set of internet services - until it was outlawed. But in a country where only a quarter of the citizens has access to broadband internet, aren't we doing the population a disservice by taking away their internet access, however limited?

Zero rating is essentially the equivalent of a collect call - the receiver pays. What is wrong with that? Even wikimedia supports zero rating!

It isn't win-win but lose-it-all

The thing is - the provider will be the gate keeper of what services you can. You are allowed only on a piece of the internet, being blocked not by technical boundaries but by a business model. A model which allows providers to extract more money from their business than they otherwise would have - not by offering more services, but by offering less.

The result will inevitably be lower data caps because it forces more companies to pay for zero rating! This is exactly what happens in Canada, where $45 gets you 2GB of data - compare that to the price of 8 dollars for the same amount in Finland. Canada is now changing the rules. Cable providers have figured that out, too, and try imposing limits while excepting certain services. And indeed, when providers introduce zero rating, prices go up!


Interestingly, when zero-rating is squashed, the opposite happens. When the government forbade zero rating in the Netherlands, its largest provider KPN responded by doubling their users' data caps without a price hike.

Thus, my suggestion to the Brazil government would be: work with providers to get indiscriminate data bundles to more users, rather than empowering providers to control their users' Internet usage.


Zero rating exist by virtue of artificial Internet scarcity in the form of usage caps and it is not part of the solution to bringing Internet access to everybody. It is part of the problem.

Dealing with our flaws in thinking

This is a follow-up on a post about the limited human rationality. In that post I described some facts - just a few - that perhaps left you a little more in doubt about your cognitive abilities. Or at least more aware of the limitations our human condition comes with!

Consequences

Unfortunately, the mentioned and the many other flaws in our thinking have consequences for decision making in our society, especially when there's money to be made. The lobby of weapon manufacturing is rather stronger than that of companies creating anti-slip mats in showers and car manufacturers, well, security is merely a factor increasing the costs of cars so there's little incentive for them to hammer on that issue either. The combination of our innate inability to judge the likelihood of these and other things to harm us and the financial pressure on politicians results in massive over-spending on what is in essence irrelevant or even dangerous and harming our society. The NSA, for one, stupidity around net neutrality is another and the war on drugs is third rather prominent example. And now Ebola, of course - a disease so unlikely to kill you, you're probably more likely to be killed by a falling piano.

I think it is pretty clear, as I mentioned above, that politics and business happily abuse our lack of rationality. But probably more often, 'the system' causes issues by itself, as the insanely huge political divide in the US shows. It pays of for the media to put extreme people in front of their audience - and today, we have a country where you can't discuss politics at the office because people see the world so vastly different that only conflict can come out of a conversation. Think of the biases I discussed earlier: these world views aren't likely to get fixed easily, either.

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

I don't think anybody set out to create this divide - but it is with us now.

Now indeed, the media are part of a system working against us. They get rewarded for creating an impression of problems; and they are often uninformed and biased themselves. As John Oliver pointed out, we don't put a believer in regular human abductions by aliens in front of a camera to debate a scientist, attempting to give both sides of the debate an equal chance! We pity the few who still don't get that this, and many other issues, are settled.


Yet this is what often happens in areas where science has long come to a conclusion. Not just the moon landing but also vaccinations, global warming, evolution and a great many more things. Take the recent "Snowden wants to come home" media frenzy!

I don't think any of that is intentional. It's the system rewarding the wrong things. We are part of that 'system': we prefer news that supports our view point; and we prefer new and exciting things - a balanced point of view is boring.

Quality decision making gets harder and harder.

Dealing

One way of dealing with disagreement has been to essentially declare all facts 'up for discussion'. It all depends on your point of view, proponents of this idea say. But reality isn't as malleable as relativists make it out to be. You can choose to leave your house through the front window on the 3rd floor, but gravity's a bitch. It's nice that some want to value everybody's opinion, but the universe imposes limits to that.

We have to realize that the world is real. People can be right or wrong about it and the choices we make matter!

As a society, we need to find new ways to make decisions in a healthy way. We've done good things - we eliminated polio and smallpox, diseases that were around for many thousands of years and nobody has had them in a long, long time. River blindness is hopefully next, and others will follow. We also drove half the worlds' animals near extinction and are abusing this planet to the point where it just will become a much more hostile place in a century or two unless we change something. You can guess I'm not much into libertarianism - it is clear that we can and do impact the world and going it all alone does not solve the tragedy of the commons style issues we have. There's a problem - and the inherent complexity of the world is certainly part of it, as is our lack of rationality.

How do we deal? I used to be an optimist - when I discovered the Internet, I thought it would democratize knowledge (it has) and news (not so much). Social media, sites like Digg where people vote on what the 'best news' is, it seemed a new and improved reality. No more single points of failure. No journalists who can be bought or oppressed. And then there were open source communities, with their flat structure of decision making, ideals of equality and meritocracy. Democracy would thrive!

Reality was harsh. The Internet has allowed us to hide in our corners with like minded people. It has lots of good stuff (if you're not into economy or net neutrality, this is a good read on both) but the Internet didn't kill conspiracy theories, it fuelled them. And open source works for some, but has its own issues of inequality (and that is just one problem).

Perhaps technology can help - Google has apparently found ways to find out what's true and what isn't. I'm not so sure. I wonder what it would do to sites like this proving that even with mere facts you can create conspiracy nonsense.

Methods to the rescue

I think the solution has to be found in a system or a process in the way the scientific method works. Wikipedia describes it as follows:

The scientific method is a body of techniques for investigating phenomena, acquiring new knowledge, or correcting and integrating previous knowledge.

I prefer to call it a process, rather than a 'body of techniques'. The key is that if left to common sense, humanity decides that life emerges from lifeless matter until more than 2000 years later Louis Pasteur shows it really, really doesn't (except for this). The scientific method thus aims to take human decision making out of the equation, or at least, rigorously deal with the biases that cloud our judgment. Lots of books have been written on the subject of philosophy of science - I got my portion by way of Chalmers, worth reading.

However it works, key is that while science relies on people and thus makes mistakes, it has a process for dealing with these mistakes, correcting them over time. Confidence is gained over long periods and the result is that we have been largely refining our knowledge gained since the scientific method became widely used, rather than rewriting the world as we know it over and over again. Yes, Newton's theories on physics still stand - quantum mechanics and Einsteinian physics merely refines it, providing better results in areas Newton can't reach. Uncertainty exists in science, but only at the 'edges', where new knowledge is created. While many facts of evolution are debated, since evolutionary synthesis, we've settled on a core which is as solid as Newton's ideas about gravity; climate models might be imperfect today but much of what we discovered does not have to be debated over again and again.

Method for decision making

We have methods, systems, processes for decision making, too. Democracy is one, the trias politica part of it. But it has flaws and needs some refinement, ideally in the opposite direction of Citizens United. I don't think we can make a Philosopher King system work, so whatever we come up with has to be a bureaucracy, evolved from today's system. I think decentralization is part of the solution (majors should rule the world?), but we live together on this planet so there have to be over-arching structures, too.

I know there is research being done on the topic. And we've already come up with some strategies like the advocate for the devil.

What exactly the solution should look like - don't ask me. I'm a psychologist, I can merely tell you not to trust people and their gut instincts. If this feels like an anti-climax, well, it should. We will have to come up with solutions together - not one blogger alone!

Soon?

But we should hurry.

I believe, with self-described plutocrat Nick Hanauer, that the pitchforks are coming. Perhaps the militarization of police and governments (the NSA in particular) disrupting online security are attempts of governments to prepare for social unrest.

Maybe.

What I'm certain about is that humanity can't continue the way it is functioning now. If social inequality doesn't put a stop it, the depletion of natural resources or religious fundamentalists will. The Dutch would say: the wall will turn the ship.

Let's see how hard we'll hit it.

Why can the NSA do what it does?

This is part one of two blogs about how we make decisions and how our lack of rationality results in much of the mess we have today. I'll start with addressing the title of the blog - spying.

Much has been said about NSA by very qualified people like Bruce Schneier, comparing the NSA to

the Maginot Line (..) in the years before World War II: ineffective and wasteful.

The costs in terms of civil liberties and money resulted in one confirmed case where somebody was caught thanks to NSA spying (probably unfairly, though).

Like most technical people, I'm not impressed but very worried about the erosion of our civil rights, through the NSA spying and in other ways. And I am sure I share with others the impression that if only politicians and the general public knew more about the problem, we wouldn't make such bad decisions.

At the same time, I know I'm probably wrong about that. Like most people, I also care about global warming; health care; poverty; war; and the countless other things arguably Wrong With The World. And collectively, we know all there is to know about them.

Somebody, or a small cabal, must be causing this, then - an argument you often hear about many things gone wrong.

Is there a cabal? Let me invoke Hanlon's razor:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

Because I think it's the human condition that got us here, not malice of anybody in particular. We just, collectively AND individually, fail at making the right decisions.

So the question should be: what makes us so unreliable? So easy to lie to, especially in groups? Why do we believe conspiracy theories that often require us to believe far more fantastic things than the reality they try to disprove? How can fans kill people only in South Korea?

I'd like to dig into that a bit in this post, more of an essay than a blog, I suppose. The immediate reason is the mess surrounding the NSA (probably not news to most readers of my blog), where one-liners and the inherent complexity of the issue have ensured most people I talk to don't see the problem.

Reality is that the more you know, the harder it is to have a firm opinion. In reality, often conflicts are like Israel vs Palestine - if you pick a side, you're wrong. The complexity of real life issues makes it easy for governments and companies to play people - I feel an urge to point to Russia, but how do we know they are not right claiming Israel-backed Neo-Nazis used US supplied weapons to shoot down Flight 17? You can point out that historically, (neo)Nazis and Jews haven't gotten along very well. That's a fact. But so is the support of the EU for 'political reform' (overthrowing a legitimate, democratically elected government) in Ukraine. How valuable are facts and reason in a complicated situation?

I don't want to talk about the facts of any specific situation here. I'm not an expert in pretty much every relevant domain and neither are all of you! But we do have decision power - that is how democracy works. Luckily, with the Internet today, it is possible to have the most important facts around. And unfortunately, it does not lead to better decisions. So I want to look at it from my background in psychology and talk about how we deal with knowledge and how we make decisions.

Most of the time, we make decisions using 'common sense'. Our gut feeling, which was useful when we were still in Africa. But what works when you're hunting antelope might just not do the trick when you have to decide for an insurance company.

Why we don't get it

The problem lies in cognitive biases, described by Wikipedia as a "pattern of deviation in judgment". That's a nice understatement if you ask me.

A cognitive bias is a remainder of our Africa times, setting us up for certain errors. You'd be surprised how much of our thinking is in our genes. It is why most people are afraid of snakes and spiders: somehow, our genes have programmed our brain to quickly learn to fear snake and spider like objects, but be totally fine with bunnies and flowers.

To understand how limited our ability for logical thinking is, let's remind ourselves of Optical Illusions. I'm sure you've seen many by now and you should realize how flawed our vision is. Yet we have evolved to 'see stuff' for millions of years. We have a big part of our brain dedicated to it. And we use our eyes all day long, every day of our life. Yet, these images keep confounding us. To top it all off, there is change blindness, showing it isn't just bad - we are terrible.

Logic, on the other hand, is quite new. While some brilliant people were inventing math and logic thousands of years ago, most humans kept busy hunting, later growing food. And most of the time, in day to day life, we work on the automatic pilot. There's a reason we learn to recognize objects with little effort as babies already but have to be taught the mere basics of math during excruciatingly long sessions at school! Humans are naturally absolutely horrible at math and logic, to the point where somebody with some reasonable knowledge of probability could have won half the riches of the ancient world by gambling - probability theory was only developed in the 17th century.

And if you think you did well in those 16 years of school, answer this:

A bat and ball together cost $1.10. 
The bat costs $1.00 more than the ball.
How much does the ball cost?

See the answer two chapters further, just before the end.

It shouldn't be a surprise to learn that the list of cognitive biases is as long as it is. Most of the time, instead of 'proper' logic thinking, we use heuristics, shortcuts to 'good enough' solutions. They work great - if you're hunting antelopes.

To state the obvious: we're not. To go back to the NSA - we're letting them go wild. And: global warming, poverty, war... We're not doing that well, as Douglas Adams pointed out:

“This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy.”

Some biases explained

You might have clicked some of the links above and seen some examples already, but lets bring this to life with a familiar example: why are so many people afraid of flying?

Let's turn the question around. SHOULD you be afraid of flying? There's a risk, certainly. But it is a well known fact (I won't even link to anything) that the chances of an accident when traveling by plane are larger on the way to and from the airport than while in the air! So why do many people still feel flying is dangerous? It is due to the way our brain does statistics. It's nothing like a calculator...

Our brains have ways of estimating how likely something is. They do that by digging in our memory: the easier it is to recall multiple instances of something, the more likely it is to happen. That makes sense - if you found food three times when walking a certain path, there is a high likelyhood of you finding more there rather than on a path where you never found anything to eat. It's clear where you should go if you are real hungry.

But our memory isn't terribly precise. First of all, it stores information in relation to emotion. This means when you're sad you can remember sad things better and when you're happy, happy events come to mind easier. It also stores things better when they are associated with strong emotions. This makes sense: events which upset, anger or scare you are probably more important than those which don't elicit any particular emotional response. You'll remember less details from your home-work travel from Tuesday a week ago then that crazy ride in a roller coaster, even though the latter didn't even get you to anywhere special.

This effect causes us to make massive errors in estimating things like the likelihood of getting a car accident, slipping in the shower or getting killed by a terrorist. And flying, of course - plane accidents feature prominently in the press and cause a lot of anxiety. But let me remind you:

Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.

These accidents are worth talking about - don't blame the media for reporting the news. It's just that we fail at judging how likely it is that it happens to us.

And this is just one flaw related to just one aspect of how we think - statistics. We're not too good when it comes to statistics and causality either, as XKCD points out below.



Our failure to handle statistics can be abused quite easily, and not just in gambling or other situations where statistics obviously play a role. In marriage counseling, a therapist might ask you to try and come up with five good things about your partner. This wouldn't be too hard and put you in a more positive mood. If the therapist was evil, however, he/she could ask for ten good things instead. While you might get to ten, a number that should give more confidence than a mere five, paradoxically the difficulty in coming up with such properties is not going to be good for the relationship.

And there's (again) no malice needed. Stereotypes, for example, are known to cause behavioral changes without awareness of the subject ("you do something but don't know why you are doing it"). In an interesting experiment, it was shown that if you let a group of white people and people of color complete a standardized test, they can either do equally well, or not. It depends on what you tell them it is a test of "diagnostic of intellectual ability" or not!


That's right: when they know it is an IQ test, African-Americans score significantly worse than white people, while they actually do a little better when the same test is done without any mention of its diagnostic abilities. They let the stereotype come true, unintentional and unconscious.

An awesome example of how prejudices influence us on a fundamental level can be found in this great video of a talk by Mahzarin Banaji, who shows to an audience of liberal, well educated scientists the gender bias in their brains. Watch the section with the test below and while she does the test, participate! Speak out the 'left' and 'right' so you can experience the effect for yourself.


If you participate, you will notice that you easily do the first three tasks - but the fourth is inexplicably harder. This shows the fundamental bias in your brain: you take twice as long to answer a question that isn't congruent with your unconscious gender prejudice! Professor Mahzarin notes that she, herself, exhibits this same bias - about 75% of men and women do. Racism exists even in people with the best of intentions.

Nobody can be blamed for this - it is how we, humans, function, just another one of our many flaws. Stereotypes are central to how we function, influencing our behavior at every corner in our lives. They ARE the biases, the short cuts of thought, themselves!

What does this all add up to? For one, you can't judge how dangerous something is. That is why we spend lots of time and money to reduce risks that are tiny, see also this and this.

Confirmation bias

Let's discuss one more bias, confirmation bias. This is one particularly nasty bugger:

Confirmation bias, also called myside bias, is the tendency to search for, interpret, or recall information in a way that confirms one's beliefs or hypotheses. It is a type of cognitive bias and a systematic error of inductive reasoning.

Remember, the inductive reasoning Wikipedia mentions here is the one based on probability: after you've seen over 50 expensive cars in a new place you're visiting, you might be inclined to think it is a rich city. Maybe. But remember what I said earlier: how does your brain assess probability? Memory recall.

Wikipedia mentions explicitly that your brain has a tendency to remember things that fit the theory you are trying to verify! That means that it will fail to bring to mind the slum around the airport you saw from the airplane. Yes, your brain will explicitly take away your ability to properly judge a situation.

It sure makes you feel more confident about your decision. But not any less wrong.

And that is just the memory side of this bias. Countless studies have shown we explicitly look for evidence that fits our expectation. A truly impressive example is in the video below:

A little background on this experiment is here and an opinion piece by the LA Times connects it to how white people demonize people of color in the aftermath of Fergusson. Of course, when it comes to minorities there are many biases in play, this is just one of them.

About the Bat and the Ball. The bat was a dollar more expensive than the ball, and no, the ball isn't 10 cents with the bat being 1 dollar. That would make the bat only 90 cent more expensive. 5 ct and 1 dollar and 5 cent. Of course, if you did the math, you wouldn't get it wrong. But if you think quickly - you are. Because you're then using a shortcut. Sadly, you do that most of the time, and not just when math is involved.

The human intellect is particularly good at over-estimating itself. We even consider unrealistic positivism about oneself a healthy attitude - people who are more realistic are clinically depressed. There's a sad list of self deceptions here. And if you think that high intelligence means less cognitive biases - think again. It might even be that the opposite is true!

In a way, this video gives a philosophical view on the subject, inspired by Plato's cave:


I hope that with some of the facts and thoughts above, I've made you a little bit more humble, dear reader. Because if we're to solve the problems we have, we need exactly that...

Read part two for some thoughts on the consequences and dealing with our limitations. Feel free to comment below!

LAX, SCALE, KDE, SUSE, GNOME and ownCloud

Lobby of the venue

Back home. Tired and jetlaggy, but satisfied: SCALE rocked!

SCALE loves ownCloud

The 13th South California Linux Expo was awesome! It is the biggest LinuxFest in the USA. While decidedly different in nature from Europe's biggest Linux event that that took place just three weeks prior (FOSDEM), we met similarly enthusiastic existing and future users. Conversations were also similar: about half the visitors already knew ownCloud, often using it or planning on deploying it; and the other half was more than a little delighted to hear about it, often exclaiming they had been looking for 'something like that' for a while. Negativity was extremely rare: I don't recall a single negative comment at SCALE (merely a few people who liked ownCloud but had no use for it personally), FOSDEM had one conversation starting unpleasantly but quickly turning around - even though one feature of ownCloud wasn't up to snuff, the user was happy with the experience as a whole.

Before the action started!

For most users, ownCloud was simply a wonderful product and they used it at home, deployed it for customers or managed it in their company. Some asked what features were coming or just arrived in ownCloud 8, or asked about the state of specific features and in more than one occasion they very enthusiastically told me how excited they were about ownCloud, how they loved it and how they were telling everybody to use it!

ownCloud to-go

Those who didn't know ownCloud were almost invariably surprised and excited. I can't count the times I heard "wow, why did I never hear about this before" and "dude, I've been looking for something like this for ever!". Often, people wondered how long ownCloud had been around (we just turned five), if it was open source (yes, with love), how many people contributed to it (719 and counting) and how many users it has (we guestimate over 2 million, with 500,000 in this single deployment alone). Oh, and, does it scale? The deployment linked above and a mention of users like CERN can put most concerns to rest. Yes, ownCloud scales from Raspberry Pi to Atom Smashing size.

What came up a few times as barriers to their future usage of ownCloud was pretty much what I discussed before. Running a server at home is not easy and I walked by the EFF booth to ask about progress on Let's Encrypt to ask about the progress of solving one aspect of that problem: more easily getting SSL certificates. I was told the project is on track for the 2nd half of this year.

Frank and Bryan Lunduke

It is wonderful to have such energizing, positive, enthusiastic users - and to have such an enthusiastic booth crew to talk to them as well. At the booth we had Frank, Matt, Ron, Camila and myself. Awesome it was and we had great fun! Below a timelapse video of Saturday morning. It was still rather quiet but it is nice to see us jump around!

Stuff and talk

Just like at FOSDEM, we brought ownCloud stickers, hand outs explaining ownCloud to users and developers as well as some posters for the booth and pins to give out. This was all very much appreciated - I estimate we gave out about 400 hand outs and 500 or so stickers as well as about 50-100 pins.

Sunday at 3PM, I gave a talk about Privacy and ownCloud, with Frank finishing off with a section about his talk at MIT where he discussed ownCloud's Federated Cloud sharing feature and where it is going. The talk was well received; I think the angle I took to privacy (inspired by my background in psychology) spoke to the audience and Frank's description of federation and how it's done in ownCloud was very interesting. owncloud.org and owncloud.com will feature blogs with some more information about this soon.

Friends

Big, big booth!

I also walked by the booths of 'old friends' - the openSUSE/GNOME/KDE crew in particular, it was awesome to meet them. Some I hadn't seen in years, others I met for the first time. They did an amazing job and richly deserve the reward they earned for most Stunningly Amazing Booth Crew (don't know the real name of the booth award but that's what it should be). If you think that 'just' GNOME an KDE being incorporated in the openSUSE booth isn't enough - Master Planner of the Booths Drew aims to bring in Enlightenment and XFCE as well next year. Supposedly a Trello board has been set up already. I bet it won't be long before it has grown to the point where the SCALE organization needs to give the 'openSUSE booth & friends' a separate hall at SCALE...

I have to note that it was thanks to our green friends that I could hang up the ownCloud flyers - they lend me some (green!) tape to do that.

The KDE booth had a bunch of terribly cool stickers (I only now realize I forgot to get one for myself!) as well as the "frameworks 5" flyers. I could only bring, like, 5 t-shirts and a dozen old 'join-the-game' flyers so I'm glad Bert Yerke and his wife, who formed the awesome local KDE team, had created the other materials. We already discussed 2016, as they have plenty of ideas on how to improve the booth!

Awesome stickers...

If you, dear reader, want to help out at the KDE or ownCloud booth next year - let me know, either in the comments or by mail. I can promise you: it is awesomely fun and by far not as scary as you might think! Bert and Matt and everybody who has ever been at a KDE, openSUSE, ownCloud or other FOSS booth can attest to that: it is a great way of getting involved and making a big difference!

Bonus points for who finds a suitable meaning for the one item in the title which isn't yet an acrynym ;-)

FOSDEM 2015

FOSDEM was crazy.

ownCloud booth between Diaspora and Tor

Regulars know it always is but it somehow managed to surprise me still.

The ownCloud booth was pretty much continuously swamped with visitors and even with 3-4 people there almost all the time, we could barely talk to everybody who had questions - let alone approach people who might have. So, sore feet, but still a blast. My biggest regret is that I barely left the booth to check out other projects I love. Luckily, ownCloud was flanked by awesome projects!

Diaspora, Tor, KDE, openSUSE...

I had a chat with the Diaspora folks at the booth next to us and greatly look forward to the upcoming release. They had a nice flyer-y paper which also included some development stats with the number of active contributors and such, a very useful thing to have so you can quickly see how a project is doing. Diaspora had a hard time since the crazy start, but things are picking up again and 66 people contributed to this important project over the last year.

I only visited the KDE booth a few times for a chat and to check out the new t-shirts (we brought a bunch of the 'old' style t-shirts with us and Ovidiu brought the new ones), not much different from openSUSE. I did talk to the usual subjects and met Douglas. Great to hear the merger of Factory and Tumbleweed is working out very well.

The Open Build Service continues strong and it was interesting to hear some thoughts on a conversation with Debian developers. They are (finally?) also working on reproducible builds, being bitten by some of their processes. I mean, if you become a Debian developer, you're nearly root on all the build systems and have a lot of fun with all the supported architectures. Compared to the robust, transparent processes and easy dealing with multiple architectures and different distribution versions on OBS - it seems a pointless struggle to me. It's not like OBS is evil, proprietary code, nor obscure and barely maintained! But I guess change is hard in such a bureaucratized organization.

Oh, and I look forward to the openSUSE Conference in den Hague! There is good progress with the organization of the event. Perhaps some Debian core developers should participate and have a look at OBS before Lennert solves the problem in a way that makes packaging irrelevant ;-)

Tor - darn, despite standing next to them, I didn't have time for a good conversation and I'm glad some FSFE friends walked past our booth or I wouldn't have known about the FSFE's upcoming valentine campaign I hope we can participate in!

marketing material package assembly

ownCloud

I mentioned our booth was busy. Wow. We have been creating some marketing materials and this was a bit of a test run. I send out materials in envelopes, and I thought - "let's bring 8 packages and see how they fit. Those left can be taken by the other team members to other events."

Result:

• stickers were out (from all packages!) by 3PM on Saturday, flyers on Sunday morning. I need to re-assess the configuration of the packages.
• The developer and user flyers are not easily (or at all) identifiable as such. And the usage of red on the developer flyer triggers people to grab that one first. Looks like my education as psychologist failed me here, I should have known!
• Everybody who had a look at the user flyer could tell me what ownCloud was about - the contents are good.
• People are baffled by the fact that a PHP app that runs on a Raspberry Pi can scale to +500K users at universities or organizations like CERN. We can explain this better!

So, both in terms of organization and contents of the marketing materials, some good ideas on improvements.

Besides the materials, the conversations were mostly 'the usual': incredibly up-beat. Of course, nothing is perfect but the vast majority of visitors was very positive and enthusiastic about ownCloud. Over half had it running and was curious about the upcoming release, while the other half either already knew about it and was planning to play with it, or was very delighted to hear what it was as they had been looking for a way to get out of the proprietary file storage world.

... rulez

I swear, if the average citizen was anything like the FOSDEM visitor, the ownCloud user base would be twice the size of the proprietary clouds combined already... Of course, the world isn't like that and ownCloud is has to overcome some hurdles still.

Then again, if you see the recent announcements like OpenCloudMesh, universities and public research institutions around the world are diving all-in on ownCloud. At FOSDEM, two staff members from the ULB IT team (where FOSDEM takes place) came by the booth to share they were experimenting with ownCloud for staff and students and I talked to many employees and owners of a variety of companies busy testing or deploying ownCloud.

With the quickly growing number of ownCloud providers, perhaps the future for ownCloud (and data ownership for consumers and businesses alike) lies in such deployments, rather than people running their own servers. This is already a huge decentralization compared to everybody on one of the 4 or 5 clouds from Google and friends, which would help our privacy and security.

If things continue like this, the number of 2 million ownCloud users will have to be revised up to triple that before 2016 is here. I'd welcome that!

What's Holding ownCloud Back?

In the recent article about the ownCloud event program, I pointed out that while ownCloud has 2.5 million users, it is a drop in the ocean looking at the number of Internet users (a little over 4 billion today). The announcement of the "Let's Encrypt" initiative from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla and others prompted me to write this: it is one step in the direction of removing the limitations holding back wider ownCloud adoption. What does the future hold?

Easy ownCloud

As Frank pointed out in his blog on the future of PHP, ownCloud has ease of use as an explicit and very important goal. And while the technological choices made aren't always so exciting and bleeding edge, they do result in ownCloud being very easy to deploy on a very wide range of devices. Plenty of tutorials exist showing it running on everything from Rasberry Pi devices to big iron at organizations like CERN, where physicists looking for the origins of the universe are routing hundreds of terrabytes of data through their CernBOX build on ownCloud, sharing and collaborating on the data analysis.

Limitations

Unfortunately, there are limitations outside of what ownCloud can directly control.

In the database area, SQLite is default because it requires no manual setup whatsoever. But performance suffers when an installation has more than a trivial amount of data. When sharing with more than 15 users or indexing your mp3 connection, SQLite usage leads to frequent time-outs and other issues!

Another, more serious issue, is the architecture of the current internet. Most users are set up at home behind a firewall provided by their internet router. While this provides some additional security, it is mainly because the limited number of unique addresses available in the still widely-used 'IPv4' protocol. It simply is impossible to assign a unique address to each device connected to your internet at home. But this means your server will not be reachable when you're not home, unless you adjust some settings on your router. While we can configure some routers automatically, most we can't and as every router is different, an easy 'generic' how-to can't be provided either.

A third issue is that an ideal ownCloud platform would be small and cheap devices like the Raspberry Pi, but these are almost all based on 32bit CPU's. Due to technical limitations in the platform ownCloud builds on, this means you won't be able to have it handle files bigger than about 4 gigabyte! That is a big limitation if you'd like to store your virtual machine or Blue Ray collection on your ownCloud.

The fourth issue I see is security. While not the biggest problem of the three, setting up a server to be secure, including a decent SSL certificate, is not easy. I personally couldn't figure it out and while I'm new to server things, I am not a technology hater by any means. My parents wouldn't ever be able to figure it out and more importantly, they wouldn't want to!

Solutions

These four issues to wider ownCloud adoption aren't the only ones, but as far as I can tell, the biggest. So how do we deal with it?

There are several routes to an even easier ownCloud installation. Having a pre-setup operating system in the form of a container (Docker?) or a virtual machine can take care of much of the trouble around database setup and help a lot with the security issue. However, it can't run on light hardware like a Raspberry Pi and doesn't deal with the file size problem.

When it comes to the address limitations, the internet is slowly transitioning to IPv6 which will provide more unique addresses for each person than IPv4 offered in total (see here how Google explains IPv6). So, essentially, we just have to wait for this problem to be solved.

The hardware problem is also working on solving itself: the upcoming new swath of ARM CPU's (and Intel CPU's targeting the embedded market) are fully 64 capable so while current-gen Raspberry Pi devices (and other embedded devices like routers!) aren't perfect for ownCloud, a year from now many new devices will be perfectly capable of providing a great ownCloud experience.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation's "Let's Encrypt" initiative offers a (partial) solution for the security issue. Without it, a pre-configured ownCloud system will most likely be set up to use a self-signed certificate. While secure in principle, it always warns visitors of the self-signed state and thus isn't ideal. Let's Encrypt provides an automated and more importantly free (in terms of cost) solution for this.

And now

While I'd love for all these changes to be implemented yesterday, in reality we simply have to wait for the transitioning to IPv6 and 64bit CPU's. In the mean time, we can already start working on integrating Let's Encrypt into virtual machine and Docker images with a pre-configured MySQL (or MariaDB) and perhaps recommend people to run them on a 64bit capable system like a modern NAS or a NUC. The ownCloud-in-a-Box image on SUSE Studio is a great start!

Meanwhile, getting ownCloud ready to run on a wider range of devices and perform a wider range of 'cloudy' functions like running as backend of the Chromebook devices (see this page and ping me if you want to get involved) should be on the agenda as well. I personally look forward to more 'social' integration in ownCloud, like the ability to comment on images or other data and share these with the people you share files with. We're on it, tags sharing is integrated for ownCloud 8 and a generic metadata repo was created (empty still). Get involved if you can!

Obviously, telling people about ownCloud is still important - which is what the ownCloud event program is all about - and help is welcome. Go to owncloud.org/promote and share the love!

Saving Face and the threats to privacy in our society

I'm not talking about the 2012 documentary, nor an actual face. I want to discuss the expression, as defined by wikitionary:

"To take an action or make a gesture intended to preserve one's reputation or honour"

I argue that this expression is under-used in this day and age of privacy violations.

Awesomeness from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal!

Privacy is not

Tech folk like me were surprised at the publicity around the leak of celebrity nudes a few weeks ago. With the continuous string of NSA scandals over the last years, we didn't expect anybody to still think their data was safe online. Apparently, we still have to make the argument for privacy...

For many people, privacy and the arguments against NSA style "collect it all" spying seem moot: "I have nothing to hide".

Now this argument has been solidly debunked in various articles, breaking down to these main reasons:

• You don't know what you have to hide
• You should have something to hide
• Privacy is a basic human need

On the first two, security researcher Moxie Marlinspike wrote for Wired Magazine.

You don't know what you have to hide

In the US, the federal government can't even count the number of laws one can break, and Moxie argues:

If the federal government had access to every email you’ve ever written and every phone call you’ve ever made, it’s almost certain that they could find something you’ve done which violates a provision in the 27,000 pages of federal statues or 10,000 administrative regulations. You probably do have something to hide, you just don’t know it yet.

A society with perfect surveillance means anybody could be locked up at any time as everybody does things wrong all the time. Law enforcement becomes arbitrary (and consequently a great means for controlling people who do things the government doesn't like). Just one recent example: in Washington, being smelly is a crime.

Moxie does not even discuss changes in policy and politics. What is legal today can haunt you tomorrow! This is not a hypothetical situation: in World War II tens of thousands lost their lives because the Dutch government kept extensive records on every citizen.

You should have something to hide

The second point is that if laws were never broken, they would never be changed and progress of society would come to a stand-still. In a world of perfect law enforcement, slavery would still be with us, sodomy laws would be in effect and women wouldn't be allowed to run businesses or perhaps even drive cars. Probably nice for bureaucratic governments (things are simpler that way) but I don't think it is wise to limit the world our kids live in based on what we can deal with and understand today...

Despite their very real impact, these arguments, to many of us, seem mostly relevant around an oppressive regime. We're happy that the protests in Hong Kong are aided by techology but it doesn't make us use them.

Privacy is a basic human need

Then there is the argument that people need privacy. Not because they do illegal things, but just because. The often-heard explanation: when you go to the toilet, you close the door. Not because you do something illegal there, but just because you'd prefer doing it alone!

This might not feel like a strong argument, perhaps that is why Moxie doesn't mention it. But it goes far deeper than the other reasons for privacy, to something very central to us, human animals. Everybody feels a need to present themselves well to others! We use make-up, proper clothes, perfume and deodorant. We act and speak careful, ever mindful of the impression we leave on people. And privacy is central to control over how others see you.

Marying as WoW character

Saving face

Words like reputation and honour in the definition of "saving face" by wikitionary make it sound like a big, special thing, but it is true for everybody, every day: we all go through extraordinary length to control how others see us. It is why we carefully choose the clothes we wear and the car we drive. We even wear different faces around different people. Loving husband or wife, funny friend, hard working employee, trusted confidant, sensitive and dedicated son, powerful wizard.

We are careful to keep these separate. If one of your parents would suffer from cancer, you would share the pain with close friends, but not the poker friends at the bar. You'd share that you had to deal with a burn-out a few years ago with your husband, but not your colleagues. If you lose your job you keep up appearances to some friends, but share your feelings with others. You would tell at work about your kid puking over you at breakfast but not about your wife who suffers from depression.

The carefully build impressions others have of us are maintained at almost all costs, and we don't even realize it. It is more obvious in some situations, of course - when something bad happens to you but you don't want some group of people to know; or, typically, when dating or soliciting for a job, when you put up your best, cleanest face and present yourself as perfect as you can. Or when you get very upset when certain information (private pictures, habits or hobbies) become public. But you always care about your appearance.

Losing control?

Modern social media are putting a bit of a wrench in this form of social engineering we all engage in. A date or potential employer can look us up on the internet, finding out things we'd rather not share. And if the data isn't available openly, they can probably just pay for it. Awareness of this is still rather low but, like the Silicon Valley folks keep their kids from using computers and even send them to analog schools, many tech people I know are far more careful with their online profile than the average consumer, who happily takes the free data storage for uploading their lives to servers in the cloud.

There is a time factor at work here. This technology arrived when my generation was (mostly) old and wise enough not to put too much embarrassing stuff online. But just think of everything you did before you turned 18 - I don't know about you, dear reader, but I sure don't want that online. Yet this is exactly what the current and future generations face! Why else are tools which promise to delete your data after a short time, like Snapchat and friends, so popular - and why else do people get so upset when the promises about deleting data are broken?

Because they are being broken, and will continue to be, either by the companies themselves (your data is worth more than you think!) and by governments, hackers and so on.

I think it is important to realize how a lack of privacy impact us, as humans. In the end, it might be the most important argument: in this digital age, we lose the abilities to control how we present ourselves to others. Time to take back our data and decentralize.

EDIT: some news that came out one day after my blog post prompted some further thoughts.