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The part written in 2013, not less urgent today:

"For example, did you really intend to yield your 4th amendment rights when you granted a 3rd party access to your files as a part of Mac Software Update, Windows Update, Virus Scanners, etc., or when you started using a service-tethered smartphone?

Anyway, unlike 'web tracking' issues which seem to be broadly ignored because of our love for ad-supported services, I hope we all (especially the young readers of reddit, hackernews, etc) wake up to the fact that these privacy and transparency issues are REAL, and that they truly will impact you and the country you live in, and that even if you don't consider yourself an activist you really should get informed and form an opinion. Again, this is a non-partisan issue, and let's all work to ensure that it stays this way.

Two great organizations where you can learn are EPIC and EFF. (Disclosure: I am on the board of EPIC.) Take it in, and think. Your contributions are needed and would of course be quite welcome.

http://epic.org

http://eff.org "

Ray Ozzie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Ozzie

That's a super comment and yet not a day goes by here on HN that I read the exact opposite: that privacy is dead and that we should all just roll over and enjoy our Amazon, Google, Apple and Microsoft telemetry because it isn't going to change back.
Since I frequently enjoy reading your comments, I know you don't feel that way ;-) However, probably for the masses it's generally true. We've kind of been here before, though. I mean there was a time where free (as in freedom) software was regarded as a complete joke. Only long bearded hippies used it and doing so was considered to be the high tech version of self-flagellation. Now, thanks to many people (with or without beards) we live in a world where choosing development tools that aren't free software is considered to be almost insane by most. OK, it's not Nirvana, but it's a heck of a lot closer than I ever expected we'd get.

Just as we did in the 1980's, I think we need to hold the fort and keep writing software. We need to write stand-alone applications that the user is in control of. We need to build alternatives to the stampede of needlessly cloud based offerings. And we need to keep chipping away at building federated, distributed applications where isolation is not an option. We have a long way to go, but that's always been the case for those that value software freedom. We should be used to it by now :-)

One final point: I think a lot of people will feel that we are a fringe community and can't possibly make an impact. Mastodon can not topple Twitter. Riot will never touch Facebook. This is probably true, but the more we write code that adheres to our values, the closer we get. We just need to keep chipping away. It is possible that one day at least some significant portion of the population will consider that the use of services controlled centrally by a single corporation is just insane. It might never happen, but if we don't keep building it's guaranteed not to happen.

I would love to have an open source self hostable version of Google Docs.