Freedom & Privacy

2011-08-14, 08:44

PageKite's goal is to give you the freedom to publish your content as you see fit, using your own devices and keeping all your data directly under your control.

Here's why we think that matters:

• Centralization of the Internet
• PageKite's Role
• Sibling Projects

Centralization of the Internet

PageKite is a response to a very large problem: the centralization of the Internet.

In order to use the Web for communication, Internet users everywhere have grown accustomed to taking their personal data - photos, blog posts, videos - and uploading it to some third party's computer in some remote data center. This third party is usually one of a select few American corporations, which operate with very little oversight, under laws which are unfamiliar and unhelpful to most of the people on the planet.

This basic fact has unwanted side-effects ranging from privacy concerns, to censorship, to artificial scarcity, to poor service.

This situation runs counter to the core design principles of the Internet: the Internet was designed as a peer-to-peer network where any computer could directly communicate with any other computer - any computer could be a client or a server, or both. Unfortunately, the Internet lost this quality long ago due to a variety of factors, the largest of which are IP address scarcity and security concerns. 1)

Today, most of our computers have "fake" IP addresses and are trapped behind firewalls. They are invisible to the world and unreachable, which is why we have to upload our data to more privileged machines - taking it out of our hands and putting under the control of companies like Google, Amazon and Facebook.

With the current push towards "cloud computing", this situation is only getting worse.

PageKite's Role

PageKite fights this centralization of the Internet by making it easy for you to run servers on your own computers, in your own country, in your own home.

This lets you take control over your data:

• You don't need a Privacy Policy for your own computer.
• You can still share your data with friends, family, coworkers or the whole world, using free software and standard tools.
• You get to choose when your data is available, and to which people.
• Your data is protected by the same privacy laws as protect the privacy and sanctity of your home. If the government want to confiscate it or censor you, in most countries they will need a warrant to do so - which is often not the case for data stored "in the cloud".

We think that is all pretty important.

PageKite is OpenSource software, which means you can examine the code and make sure it is not spying on you. You can change the code and you can run it yourself.

PageKite is also a company, providing a service and attempting to bring this technology to the masses. If you support us with your dollars, we will be able to continue to work on this mission and improve our OpenSource code. Our company aims to make decentralization a little easier and more convenient - and we strive to be as privacy friendly as we can:

We Don't:

• Collect personally identifiable information we do not need
• Keep detailed logs of who accesses what on your sites. Those records will be created by your own software, on your own computer, under your control.
• Record your server's IP addresses.

We Do:

• Help you keep your server's IP addresses private. This means if someone tries to attack your web server, odds are they will attack our front-end instead. We are pros and can handle that.
• Allow (and encourage) you to use advanced technology like Tor and end-to-end HTTPS encryption with PageKite.
• Provide free, automatically enabled encryption to all our users, and are up-front about its limitations and the alternatives.
• Encourage you to use your own domain name for your sites, so your identity on-line can be independent of your relationship with us.

On a related note, it is worth mentioning that we are based in Iceland, where the International Modern Media Institute is working to create the world's best legal environment for free speech.

And our Privacy Policy (even we have to have one) is pretty short and sweet.

Sibling Projects

Today there are quite a few other freedom and privacy oriented projects in the Free Software community, many of which are unable to reach their ultimate potential because of the basic fact that it is very hard for the average person to run a server at home.

Some examples of such efforts are:

• Diaspora*
• FreedomBox
• MediaGoblin
• OwnCloud
• Unhosted
• ... and many more!

These awesome projects and others like them were a large part of the inspiration for PageKite. It is our hope that our work can complement theirs.

Footnotes

1) IPv6 was supposed to fix the address scarcity and bring the peer-to-peer qualities back to the Internet. Unfortunately, IPv6's potential is crippled by deployment difficulties, incompatibility with IPv4, the culture of firewalls and the ubiquity of mobile devices. PageKite on the other hand, is explicitly designed to work around all those problems and the fact that it works at the application layer means it can be gradually deployed and provide immediate benefit to those who choose to use it.