I’ve spent a long, long time thinking about ethical software, the challenges we *necessarily* give ourselves compared to closed competitors, and crucially, how to overcome those challenges.
Four and a half years ago, I wrote:
>respecting your privacy is the ethical thing to do; users have a fundamental right to the utmost privacy, even from companies and products they trust.
That’s as true as ever.
cassidyjames.com/blog/privacy-…
#Privacy #OpenSource #FreeSoftware #FOSS #FLOSS
Privacy and elementary OS ⋅ Cassidy James Blaede
How we protect your data from ourselves and otherscassidyjames.com
Hallowemo Cassidy 💀
in reply to Hallowemo Cassidy 💀 • • •The combination of rapidly-improving technologies like GNOME, Flatpak, Wayland, and Portals also means our active privacy protections are also better than ever before.
I went on to write:
>If and when we are able to develop an open, peer reviewed, industry-respected method of responsible and privacy-first telemetry, we may consider doing so.
While that post was in the context of elementary OS, I believe every word I wrote.
#Privacy #OpenSource #FreeSoftware #FOSS #FLOSS #GNOME #Flatpak
Hallowemo Cassidy 💀
in reply to Hallowemo Cassidy 💀 • • •I have also seen first-hand the wall we constantly hit when we can only rely on anecdata gathered from the most online, tech-savvy crowd—which is the majority of folks reading this, for example. 😉
We are at a supreme disadvantage by not having good data to help inform our design processes. For System76, elementary, and GNOME I have been involved in small user studies and surveys to help inform us and while it was better than nothing, it always had an extreme bias towards that crowd.
Hallowemo Cassidy 💀
in reply to Hallowemo Cassidy 💀 • • •What about that “privacy-first collection of useful data” I suggested as a future possibility?
It turns out Endless OS Foundation—the grant-funded social-wellfare non-profit deeply involved in furthering GNOME and Flatpak with tens of thousands of non-technical users across the globe—has been working on that. And we’re sharing it with and planning to work with the broader ecosystem in order to further the quality free and open source software—while keeping privacy paramount from the start.
Hallowemo Cassidy 💀
in reply to Hallowemo Cassidy 💀 • • •Read my colleague @wjt’s post covering the privacy-first system we have built into @EndlessOS, how it fits together, and why it exists.
blogs.gnome.org/wjjt/2023/07/0…
I hope this can serve as the beginning of the ecosystem coming together to solve this unique challenge in a way that is objectively superior than any proprietary system—all with privacy as the fundamental principle.
#EndlessOS #GNOME #OpenSource #FreeSoftware #FOSS #FLOSS
Endless OS’s privacy-preserving metrics system – Will Thompson
blogs.gnome.org