Ozi Traveller - 04.08.20, 06:57:38 CEST:
> I've switched to teams.

I avoid Teams as much as I can. Unfortunately we have Office 365 at work.

I read about all the privacy issues on Zoom, but at least from the
reaction of Zoom people I had the impression they are taking them
seriously. And they are still smaller than Microsoft. However I do not
completely trust them. The CEO publicly stated he did not want to enable
end to end encrypted for free users for the service in order to *help*
the FBI. The partly reconsidered, but still that kind of attitude is not
acceptable for me from a privacy point of view.

I also avoid Zoom. There is some chat I still used it for and if that
would be end-to-end-encrypted in the future without me having to
register an user account with them, it might be okay. However its still
proprietary. Unfortunately it appears that Nextcloud Talk which I
installed for myself cannot record talks. You can consider this a
feature. But with agreement of *all* participants this would be a good
thing to have.

For me Microsoft with Office 365 is by no means better than Google or
Amazon. They are doing the exact same thing if you ask me. And there are
several data / privacy protection officials who say it is legally
impossible to use Microsoft Teams and Co in Germany.

I tried to understand their privacy statement. I failed to even grasp
the structure of that document. Their privacy declaration is a complete,
utter and incomprehensible mess. I am not sure a mere mortal is supposed
to understand this crap.

And then Max Schrems and his team at noyb.eu convinced the highest
European court to finally kick Privacy Shield.

I hope that some day companies stop the insanity to introduce
proprietary software they have *no control* over *whatsoever* through
the web browser and public cloud service providers, cause it does not
even run on *their* computers. This stuff is proprietary software through
the backdoor called browser. It completely undermines the free software
movement while at least in part *using* free software. It is a trick for
companies to regain and even extent their control over users. It
violates user freedom at its core.

I strongly distrust large public cloud service providers and I think
they are in sum detrimental to a free and open society.

I just recommend Why Privacy Matters from Gleen Greenwald

https://invidious.snopyta.org/watch?v=pcSlowAhvUk

(or use a different Invidious instance or Youtube directly as domain)

With those cloud providers you can *never* know whether they spy on you
or not. It is the perfect panopticon¹. Unless you only store *end-to-
end* encrypted data on it, in a way that even metadata is encrypted.

And even if I use something on another computer, and I do, I trust small
providers like disroot.org or smaller web hosting providers a huge lot
more than Google, Microsoft or Amazon Web Services. I'd like to host
everything in my home though and in some homes of friends I trust.

This whole centralization is a huge, big, fat mistake, if you ask me. It
concentrates way too much power in way too few hands. All those
companies who give up the control over their own infrastructure will at
one point in history receive the real invoice for that. Loss of
competence in their own employees, loss of control, increased
dependencies and in the end very like also increased cost. They are at
the mercy of their giant, yet privately owned, service providers.

I do my best to get rid of it. It is not easy though at times to
convince friends and relatives to use an alternatives. And very
challenging to convince my employer to stop using Office 365. The did not
tend to see the issues with it at least not to the point where they
would really stop using it.

However I installed my own Nextcloud and used it successfully for video
chat and more meanwhile. I also attended BigBlueButton conferences and
Jitsi meetings. I use XMPP for chat. This is the way to go forward. I am
making a little step at a time. A little step into freedom, one after
another. And I can only recommend to others to do that as well.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

Best,
--
Martin