B01: My view on privacy and open source software

Introduction

For those who know me, it is well known that i am an opensource and pro-privacy enthusiast.
It is also known that when it comes to this topic i am a little paranoid because, in the very end, i know that somehow and sometimes privacy is just an utopia.
Yet now it’s not the moment where i want to talk about my paranoia, mind that this post is intended to clarify and tell you what is my point of view when it comes to privacy and open source software.

Privacy

As per the oxford dictionary privacy is

a state in which one is not observed or disturbed by other people.
the state of being free from public attention

Oxford dictionary

The thing is that we live in a complex world and not always it is possible to accomplish what we want most, not even being free from public attention.
Isn’t it weird? Being free from being observed should be normal but in the technology era it’s not.
Social media have completely ruined this idea and have set roots on what i call “an open society”, which means a society where people keep their doors opened to everyone, everywhere.
Imagine it this way: Would you take a picture of yourself and put it everywhere around your city?
When most people answer no, what they are doing instead is the exact opposite.
But how? Well, it may seem obvious but it’s not, by posting selfies online we are legitimately putting our face everywhere. Once our picture is on the internet, it’s everywhere, yet we don’t care.
And here the idea and concept of privacy starts playing the game.
By exposing our pictures, exposing our private life, we are giving for free information about us, and all of these big money-farms such as Meta, are dealing our data around as if it was a drug.
I think that everyone should consider more what privacy really is, because if we keep it this way, we will end up living in a society where we are fully controlled.
And now we can talk about control.
Having a good privacy is NECESSARY to avoid being controlled by the very people that are making money out of us.
Do you really think that when you go shopping you are buying what you really want? That’s the millennial lie, because you are controlled from the very beginning of your morning routine when you lift up your phone and watch some stories on instagram.
Ads are placed everywhere and they perfectly fit your interests, strangely then they slowly turn into something your mind absorbs into subliminal messages.
Later on you go to your local grocery store and you end up buying products that you’ve seen, even for a fraction of second, around. Don’t lie to yourself, it is this way.
But what am i telling you this? I don’t want to scare you, neither i want to make you do something you don’t want to but you should consider your privacy more.
Those big companies are making money out of your data and furthermore you are later giving them money by buying their products.
How can you change this? Start by using an opensource trusted VPN, start confusing the big money algorithm that’s behind ads, set up your phone to change its GPS location randomly in the world, start using well configured browsers that like your privacy such as Firefox, Opera, TOR, and for God’s sake stop posting your stuff online, they are completely using you.
Let’s be clear, i do have an instagram profile, but i never post photos of my private life, NEVER!
Wake up to this dream, nothing is free in this world, as the good uncle Bob said once, “if something is free, you are the product”.
Thing is, my friend, that as i said before, we are slowly gliding over our own decisions, we are slowly falling into the hands of a great dystopia, and we simply don’t care, we simply leave it as it is.
Start giving more value to your privacy as first step, it’s not too late and you’ll see that will make you feel safer and protected.
This is not the end of this topic, a lot of my blog posts will be about data privacy, so, be ready to be stressed out more about it.

Open Source programs

another important topic for me is the opensource one.
as the famous uncle Bob said,

Open source software is code that is designed to be publicly accessible

uncle Bob

But why should code be publicly accessible? There are many reasons and different answers to this question, but i’ll be as quick as a bullet.
The main reason i think is that most of programmers think their code is pure gold and fault-proof.. but almost all the times it’s not like that.
Would you use a password manager that may leak all of your Hashes? I guess no.
If the code is private then only the programmer who build and projected the program can modify it and try to fix the code, whilst if the code is public, the community can help fixing the problem because it has the full view of the code.
That’s the first main reason, another reason is that i want to know what the code exactly does.
If i did use a private code password manager, how can i be sure that the program is not coded in a way that it sends my data to someone else? Well it’s not that hard to guess if a program does such a nasty thing, yet it would it would take some time before someone notices a weird behavior.
If the code is free for all, the programmer can’t hide hideous stuff in it because people would immediately notice it.
Last reason is that, it’s a moral thing. Why would you need to hide your software? Just let it free to anyone, help the community, help programmers and help people giving your source code to the world, it may help a programmer who’s stuck in a problem and may also help you to improve your coding skills.
To end up this post, i’ll be writing down here a quote of Richard Stallman, one of the knights of the free software life-style

Free software’ is a matter of liberty, not price. To understand the concept, you should think of ‘free’ as in ‘free speech,’ not as in ‘free beer’.

Richard Stallman