Breaking free from tech giants and claiming digital sovereignty

I am working on claiming ownership of all my digital online stuff.

You may be thinking why would you want to do this? These 'services' are free
Most services such as Google Drive, Iphoto, and Dropbox are offering 'free' services to you to sell your data on the back end and can look through your files you host on their computers. As more people push for more privacy when browsing the internet, doing things like opting out of cookies, the tech giants will have their major income streams dry up. The only way that I can see them making up for these losses is changing to subscription models. If all your photos or documents are on one of these services you will have to pay to have access to them and these companies can look through them using bots and even people if they find reason to. There has been content on nearly all of these 'services' that was deemed 'inappropriate' and deleted. You can never be sure what regime, both government and private companies, is going to be in power and what they think is appropriate for you to have. Will whatever government alphabet agency decide that they make less money or have less power if you are growing your own food or forming your own communities? people could see homesteading and self-reliance resources go away.

Okay that is enough on the why, though I could go on for a while, lets talk about solutions.

I have purchased a Start9 Embassy server to begin self-hosting free and open source alternatives. Up until now hosting your own server has been very difficult and limited to people who were sufficiently rich or nerdy. The Start9 is a free and open source software (FOSS) operating system for making self hosting other FOSS 'click button' easy. You can choose to purchase a server from Start9 or build your own using a raspberry pi and now x86_64 architecture computers. Maybe you want to convert an old computer to a server. Here is a link to the webpage and a short intro video. Note the video is old and some of the info is out of date, such as the setup process is now easier and does not require an app. Also many services have been added in the last year. There are many great podcasts with the team from Start9 to learn more as well.

Start9 sovereign computing



I will update my progress in future posts possibly going into detail on various services Im running. I just wanted to make sure people found out about this new computing paradigm. It has the potential to change the internet in a similar way that operating systems, such as Windows, made owing personal computers accessible by having a simple graphical user interface to use instead of command line stuff.

Have you played around with the Start9 Embassy?

Do you have other methods of taking control of your data that you would like to share?

Thanks for your feedback and ideas

I like the idea of managing my own septic system, drinking water supply, solar-electric, food production, fuel/firewood production and so much more. So the idea of managing my own data storage sounds awesome.

I am however limited in how I will would be able to communicate with distant people without using some type of platform like permies.com or twitter or gmail or t-mobile.

Maybe I should also buy DVD and CD and then save them to my local, onsite server. I could always make a backup and keep it offsite. How would I access my data when I am not at home, i would have to buy a static ip address and domain name and point it to my local computer at home and home no-one hacks it and delete everything or use it as a middle man to hack a bank or something, and then I have to prove my innocence to the officials.

I do like this topic alot. Other than file-sharing what sevice would you like to self-host? Maybe a blog too? You could host your own email service, but you would still have to email to others at which point they would then have access to all your content, to sell and data-mine.

I like a lot of the concepts but I'm not thrilled about the execution.

Soo, looking at the included apps.

Syncthing works well and Vaultwarden looks cool.
Gitea is cool if you're into coding.
I do find it funny that the name of the messaging app is the same as the Linux printer communication manager.
Cryptpad is still handing over your data to someone else.
Nextcloud is better, could be really good.
Filebrowser is nice but doesn't have the data stability of Syncthing.
Photoview is just an extension of Filebrowser.
Ghost could be really good for bloggers.
Mastodon is social media and same as the messaging apps, is only good when other people are also using it.


Over half of the apps/features on the site are about bitcoin/blockchain. Tor (seems to be the basis of some of the bitcoin stuff) seems like a good idea at first but is much more likely to get you on an NSA watchlist.

I totally agree with not giving away your data to big corporations (I even have trackers blocked to the point that I can't watch that youtube vid just by clicking on it) and I would suggest the following method of doing so that has worked for me.

Go to ebay, buy a used android phone for $15. When you have reset it, press skip to avoid registering with google . Sideload F-Droid an app repository and install Syncthing.

Honestly, I think that you're getting some very expensive hardware, a fairly standard linux distribution and some configuration of some apps for your money. I really do not like the name of their products "Sovereign". This has and is a rallying cry for movements that have caused untold misery to millions of people in recent years.

I believe in digital freedom, the reuse of functional technology and the general principle of trying to get along with as many people as possible. So I'll stick with a 10 year old macbook, a 4 year old phone with Syncthing, privacy badger and permies.com.

S Benji:
For now, the Embassy software hosts a webpage on the dark or private web using .onion URLs, so that is how it is accessed when you are not home. The more resent podcasts that featured the start9 crew reveal that one of the priorities for this year is to add clearnet (regular internet) support. This would give you the option to purchase a domain name and host it on your device. Certainly hosting a public website will increase your chances of getting hacked, but I think the incentives are small, unless you are putting up controversial information on the page. If someone is trying to hack a server to steal data and sell it, they would most likely target a big tech server because the honeypot of thousands or millions of users data. I could see myself creating a webpage just so my local community could access services that I am hosting without having to use the dark web. I would not necessarily try to make the page draw in many views and move up in search results.

As for what I want to host. I love the password manager. Other than that I'm mostly looking for private communication with my local group that collaborates toward common goals. I would also like to host a website when that is available. I like that I will be able to process bitcoin and lightning payments on the site without relying on a third party. I can also look up bitcoin addresses and transactions without sending that query to another server. If i search for a bitcoin address on someone else's node, you can guess that it is probably mine.

As for email, I don't think it is high on the priorities of the team. There are problems with email, the big one being that it has been pretty centralized into a couple big companies. If I want send someone at gmail an email, then Google has that email. I also don't think that many people are not going to care enough to change to a different email server. I would personally move away from email, but that is one of the forms of communications that people use.


James:
I have not played around with cryptpad yet, but I believe that all communications go through the cryptpad service that is hosted on your server.

Tor is private if you are only visiting .onion URLs, though anyone monitoring your traffic can see you access the Tor network, not what you are looking at. If you use Tor to access the regular internet, the exit nodes are monitored. Used this way I believe it is highly likely that you will draw attention, even if not doing anything wrong. I agree you would likely get put on watch lists.

For watching YouTube videos, I like using newpipe. It allows you to watch without ads popping up in the middle. You can also download videos or just audio. You can listen with the screen off without paying for premium. This is also available on F-droid.

Synching is great.

I agree that you are getting a version of Linux and some apps, but the thing I really like is how easy it is to get different services working together without having to deal with dependency hell. Most stuff on here is available for you to do what you please, but it is not used outside the group nerdy and interested enough to get things up and running. In my opinion this could be huge, getting many people involved. I think my money was well spent, it was about $150 more than I could buy the components myself. And I did not have to tinker, though I like too. I just wanted to support the team. I also think the time saved getting things running more than made up for the cost

I agree that the 'sovereign citizen' movement has caused some damage. I think it is also, in part, a psy-op intended to distract or even implicate those who have libertarian or anarchist views that get sucked into that rabbit hole.  This does not change my view of the word sovereign itself any more than the terrible things 'sovereign nations' do. I think the word is perfect for claiming control of ones' data as it means to have supreme power over this data.

I also like to get as much life out of my devices. I have a 10 or 11 year old laptop that was given new life by Linux. My experience has been in many ways better than when I was running windows.

I think that so much focus is on bitcoin because those who are involved with it, other than people just trying to get rich, are going to quickly see the value in claiming control over their data. They see this as similar to gaining control over money with bitcoin. Making it this easy to host bitcoin nodes and related software will only make the bitcoin network stronger in my opinion. The bitcoin enthusiasts can onboard their friends after trying it out for a while. The founder of start9, Matt Hill, said part of his motivation start developing this new operating system was the very difficult nature of setting up a lightning node.