Escape The Cloud

Join Mayank Sharma as he declares enough is enough, and stops seeding his data to popular cloud services where it’s ripe for harvesting.

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The one truly surprising part of the Information Age is the extent to which our personal information, has been commercialised. Edward Snowden’s warnings were played down as fear mongering by a privacy paranoid traitor. But recent events have shown that companies will go to any extent to collect and use our data for everything from swaying our shopping habits to influencing democracies.

We’re being tricked into handing over tons of data, usually in the garb of convenience, to the many online services we use everyday on our laptops and smartphones. From the ubiquitous cookies to single-sign ons and social buttons, there’s an unending array of data accumulating technology that follows us all over the web. Thanks to an arsenal of such tools, the online behemoths like Google, Facebook and Twitter know a great deal about us even when we aren’t using them. The widespread implementation and use of federated identity systems have essentially turned our usernames into trackers.

However, it’s not all doom and gloom. The dungeon geeks that helped free us from the clutches of the proprietary empires are banding together once again to rescue us from the blue pill-induced cloud of convenience. From hosting services that don’t divulge your personal data to assisting you in hosting your own cloud, there are plenty of options that enable you to experience the benefits of popular online service and also preserve your identity.