Jason Spadaro

Writer, Developer

Encryption Kick

-- 2019-05-01

I’ve been on a bit of an encryption/privacy lately. I can’t remember what inspired the initial thought, but it’s best summed up as me looking at my Google and Facebook accounts and thinking “you know better.” Maybe it’s the mysterious ads from correlated meta-data, or the ugly anecdotes that have become more and more common where just by talking about a product around their phone they start getting targeted for that product. Regardless a few things hit home:

  1. Lack of choice is a problem - I’ve really come to appreciate federated services since I’ve been trying to separate myself. Mastadon, for example, feels a lot like twitter, but you’ve got the to just leave one instance if you don’t like it anymore and move to another. It could be a pain, but no more than moving your email address.
  2. Consolidation is a problem - no one service should have all your information. It gives them more data points, and makes you more locked in.
  3. End-to-end encryption should be the norm - but it’s not. Not even a little. More and more zero-knowledge services are popping up, though. I personally like Cryptpad and XMPP with OMEMO encryption a lot, even if OMEMO hasn’t been completely pain free.

So I’m going to continue to divest myself from Google and Facebook, and use things like Tor and Riseup’s VPN service to befuddle tracking and metadata, even when it seems superfluous. Because I know better.