The good folks over at @Ethical_net@twitter.com have included us in their list of ethical resources: https://ethical.net/resources/
A bunch of our friends' projects are also listed, check it out and see what proprietary tech you can cut out of your daily life
@cryptpad Useful overall but ethical.net lists some unethical choices: DDG, Loomio, Signal. Looks like they may be following the crowd and not doing research.
I know there's some controversy around DDG, but Loomio is free software and can be self-hosted. I follow some of the loomio team on scuttlebutt, and I'd consider them very ethical. On what basis would you consider them unethical?
Signal is centralized, and my biggest complaint is its requirement that users submit phone numbers. Beyond that, though, they're doing fantastic work in advancing privacy-enhancing technologies. Signal is still the gold standard in many ways.
@ansuz @cryptpad Signal has a huge list of privacy abuses documented here: https://github.com/privacytoolsIO/privacytools.io/issues/779. Loomio's services are jailed in the privacy-abusing walled-garden of CloudFlare, the ethical problems of which are documented here: https://github.com/privacytoolsIO/privacytools.io/issues/374
Thanks for the links! Personally I'm still using a big list of messengers depending on what my contacts use. That includes signal, wire, whatsapp, and riot. Every one of those platforms uses the protocol developed by openwhisper systems, so in any case I respect what they've done to help advance the state of the art.
Having developed in the open is beneficial for the ecosystem, so I think it's a bit far to call them unethical. Definitely not perfect, but neither are we
I'll have to give it a try again. The last time I used it my battery life was cut in half.
I appreciated a lot of their technical decisions with regards to privacy, though.
Signal is a step in the right direction for people who are otherwise just using SMS, and I think that's the audience the makers of this list were trying to reach. You may notice that it's nowhere near as focused on privacy as privacytools.io.
@ansuz @cryptpad Jami was rough when I tried it ~1 year ago. Not sure if it has stabilized, but in terms of ethics no other tool comes close to Jami.
Signal just replaces 1 walled-garden with 6 walled-gardens. I don't call that a step in the right direction. It's designed to trap users just like other corporate social media projects, and then use the clientel as bait to trap more users.
CryptPad was pretty rough at that point too, and we still have a lot to fix, so I'm definitely not trying to call anyone out.
We may have to disagree re: OWS. I'm glad they developed the protocols used by the majority of the encrypted messengers today.
Building software for privacy is hard. Proprietary services get paid good money to deal with complaints, but I think the services you're criticizing deserve at least a little recognition for their efforts.
@ansuz @cryptpad If you read the forums on the surrounding issues, OWS is clearly a bad player with profit at the forefront of their mission. They mislead and manipulate for the corporate bottom line. They get zero credit for ethics from a deontological standpoint. If someone can harvest some useful code from them and re-insert it into an ethical ecosystem, that's great, but there is no good reason to recommend Signal app to the general public. You might as well endorse Facebook's Whatsapp.
@resist1984 @cryptpad
I met the Jami developers at fosdem 2018, and tried it out. I agree they're doing good work. All the same, I don't think anyone who does less is a bad or unethical person.
Considering ethics in boolean terms isn't really that productive, as I see it. Most things aren't that simple.