Hi everyone
as per my habit I do a personal balance during this end-of-the-year period and 2020 is the year of e.OS!
This is a sort of sentimental post to say thank you to all of you behind the enormous value I received from former founders and staff up to this great community members.
I am not new to technology and IT as I started in late 80s, so I count on my fingers the few bangs of technology and I do believe e.OS is one of these (and I wish a consolidated long term success) for a transversal, ready to adopt, open (not only in terms of code as well as model), easy but techie alternative to the insolent and data-abusive predominance techno-business model.
The new bang is that we can take back the control of the the most important digital identity device of our life previously known as phone then smartphone.
Implications and revolution behind this opportunity are enormous if a critical mass of users are conscious and ready to take (this is a socio-cultural gap difficult to overtake by a single actor).
For me, really own my data, it has meant to complete the cycle and own my data as much that I could, all along my digital foot and finger print.
I owned again a domain (after long time), bought a professional/reliable/reputable/secure email service, host my personal cloud with almost all pretended-to-be-free provided by big-data services (files and photo sharing, maps with contacts/photos/real-time tracking, contacts, calendar, tasks, notes) on all my devices and synchronized in real time.
This was just the beginning and brought me to replace my thermostat, personal laptop and then extend and inform about same good principles for family members and friends.
Refurbish and give to new life devices with planned obsolescence to reuse, recycle and save money and resources.
Continued to unexpected directions like drill down what and how an app store data for a sharp backup of personal data to secure and migrate to different devices, know/study/learn/research for alternatives to make devices compatible to this new thing of “I own my data”.
Delete social network accounts and other messaging invasive and search for excellent alternatives.
Use kids parental software to teach them privacy and subtle addictive mechanisms of video suggestion algorithms, infinite scroll down, push notifications, not focus on form but the essence.
Learn and do new things, drill down into Android differences between open project and commercial one, learn how to build an e.os for unsupported devices, don’t get stuck only on technology topics but implications behind its implementation (microG for covid tracing app, signature spoofing).
The difference nowadays is that
- technology is cheaper and easier if compared to 5 years ago, so techie people can assemble many different products and services to build a real private digital personal system
- there is a lot of talk and raising awareness of privacy concern matters
Alternatives looks still obscure and hostile for average user preferring to sleep comfortably between two pillows instead because of false feeling that “it is way too complicated” and market monopoly that is killing/phagocytosing the competitors.
But here e.foundation comes as a gift for everyone, bringing a real thing that can run on your phone (like linux distributions filled the gap of WindowsXP decommissioning) with not objective loss for both functionalities and user experience.
Rest is up to us to embrace the change and make it real all around.
Wishing a long life to e.foundation and heartfelt thanks to you all!
