The Great Handover

I’m picky about what technology I let into my life. I am privacy and ownership minded, and therefore largely cloud averse. In lots of ways, I think consumer technology peaked around the year 2000. I made this infographic to sum up ideas swirling in my head on this topic. As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words. So, I put together this timeline tracking the shift across eight major categories. I call it “The Great Handover”:

Most either don’t know about this, or choose not to concern themselves with it. This is one of those complicated things where people are just going to have different perspectives. But for me, this is very important. I still have physical media. And I keep nearly all of my own data locally. I flipped SaaS upside down and back it up aggressively to fast cheap cloud storage. I encrypt it myself before it ever even goes out on the wire. Everyone’s privacy footprint and OPSEC is different.

Over the last six months, my development workflow has let me build more of my own software for personal use, and I’ve loved it. Every tool I’ve written about on this blog was, at first, something I built only for myself. Now I’m extending that work outward and building tools that I hope other privacy-minded people with similar values and workflows might find useful.

I’ve been heads-down in development, and I’ll soon be releasing two projects: one commercial and one open source. More to come soon!