Privacy is important. Keep it with you.
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The distinction between what is public and what is private is becoming more and more blurred with the increasing intrusiveness of the media and advances in electronic technology. While this distinction is always the outcome of continuous cultural negotiation, it continues to be critical, for where nothing is private, democracy becomes impossible.
The internet offers plenty of free services, on the wave of the Web2.0 fuzz and the community boom, while all private informations are hosted on servers owned by global corporations and monopolies.
We urge you to reflect on the importance of keeping privacy for personal data. Our present world is full of prevarication and political imprisonments, war rages in several places and media is mainly used for propaganda by the powers in charge. Some of us face the dangers of being tracked by oppressors opposing our self definition, independent thinking and resistance to omologation.
People need the possibility to protect their legitimate privacy as much as their freedom to express.
It is important to keep in mind that noone else than *you* can ensure the privacy of your personal data. Server hosted services and web integrated technologies gather all data into huge information pools that are made available to established economical and cultural regimes.
Since version 2.4 of our free operating system dyne:II we introduced support for strong encryption of your /home private data with Linux dm-crypt i586 optimized Rijndael hashed SHA256, to provide an efficient and user-friendly tool to protect your bookmarks, addressbook, documents and emails by carrying them back with you, protected with a fairly strong cryptographic algorithm.
A passkey to read your data is stored inside a file, which is also protected by a password. It is possible to keep everything with you on a small usb stick, still being sure that the data won't be easily recovered in case you loose it. You can also give the passkey protecting your data to a friend, to make the data unaccessible until you meet again, which can be useful in case of tricky transports.
A public presentation of our privacy protection mechanism was held at the Ars Electronica Symposium 2007 - here are the slides: Piracy, Privacy and Thought Control tackling hot issues as anti-piracy restrictions and privacy invasion and more.
A good article warning about centralization of informations is metamute.org/en/InfoEnclosure-2.0
Some folks raising awareness:
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