About email:
I continuously bug my friends to get an aktivix or riseup email address. It feels so cosy, to keep your communications away from all the surveillance.
I do have corporate accounts too. I use them for things like job seeking and freecyle. I have managed to have most of my other stuff on non-corporate accounts, though. I don’t think I could have it in any other way …
About software:
I also wish I had the confidence to ditch all corporate software. But I still need to use Windows for some things. Especially to use hardware that has not been designed to be used with any other software.
Free Software available for Windows was extremely useful when I was still using only Windows, I started to use OpenOffice (and never looked back on Word) and the Mozilla suite for emails and browsing, then later chat too (and never looked back on Internet Explorer or Outlook Express, either). They just worked better. It was not me being smart or good with computers (I was not, I am not), or willing to work with weird things. I did struggle a lot when moving to Linux, and then only managed to “do” Ubuntu. Which is pretty much designed for the user used to Windows. More or less.
About WordPress’s ‘proper’ :
I love the idiom “when you’re not paying for the service, you are the product”. Or something like that. WordPress.com make money out of your content by putting adverts on your pages. I haven’t looked closely to their terms and conditions and I use an add-on for Firefox that blocks adverts, so I can only ask questions. Look at the adverts WordPress.com puts on your blog. Look at the adverts WordPress.com puts on other blogs. Do the adverts relate to the content? Do they relate to the country where the blogger is based? If they do, they may be sharing details like your IP address to their advertisers? Do they say anything about their criteria on sharing (selling?) your data to third parties on their ‘Terms and Conditions’?
About hits on this blog site:
I have no idea how many hits my site is getting. There used to be a plugin to count hits which for privacy reasons did not tell me where those hits came from, but that plugin stopped working and there seems be a lack of time and/or expertese in the development team to fix that.
I do kind of miss it, but it is easy to become obsessed with the amount of hits your site gets, and the other benefits outweight this, at least for me.
About me using this blog site:
I feel great using it; I used to have a wordpress.com blog and when network23.org became available I easily imported all content, and tags, etc., from two wordpress.com blogs over to this one. Now I know that I own my words, or at least I trust that my content and personal data like my IP address are not traded with between companies.
This post is actually a reply to this…