How Tonido Personal Cloud brings Data Ownership, Private Sharing and Anonymity to your Digital Life?

When we founded Tonido, our goal was to provide a compelling alternative to public online services. We figured that few companies controlling everybody’s information is not good for a equitable society. After 4 years, if we take stock of the current status of internet all our worst fears have become a new normal in internet. There is zero privacy and zero anonymity. The web is not open anymore and the whole internet ecosystem is controlled by few companies. One need to set the expectation that anything and everything one do on public internet gets tracked, aggregated, profiled and sold to a highest bidder. Don’t do anything in internet that you will not do in a public place. Atleast people’s memory fade but the internet never forgets.

The music you access, the emails you send, the photos you share, the comments you post and pretty much anything you put on public online service serve as one more data point to create your online persona . With few clicks anybody can buy that persona for a cost.

As always the individual liberty and protection of privacy is the responsibility of users. Nobody is going to do that for you. If you have young kids or newborns many of them will outlive the current set of hot internet companies. By the time your kids become adults, the data that you entrust with these companies can change many hands and come back to haunt them in many ways. Even if the current management is benevolent there is no guarantee that the future management will be benevolent. Hard times and bad economy can change the way how companies will treat your personal data.

With your permission, you give us more information about you, about your friends, and we can improve the quality of our searches. We don’t need you to type at all. We know where you are. We know where you’ve been. We can more or less know what you’re thinking about — Eric Schmidt, Executive Chairman of Google

This quote pretty much summarizes the power that we voluntarily give out to few internet companies. The new internet monopolies are not much different from the 19th century Robber Barons. The railroad magnates used their control over rail road distribution to create monopolies. In similar way the the large internet firms use network effect, control over personal data and monopoly over operating Systems to serve their profit goals. It is not illegal. It is business as usual. But as an user we need to think twice what we are getting into. What kind of control we are are forsaking?

Many of the popular internet companies (Google, Facebook and others) enforce real name policy and your data gets tracked, aggregated, and refined anytime you use their services. We are not advocating that you should not use their services. But set up your expectation that anything you do and share on these services is up for sale. “I have nothing to hide argument is not really valid here”. The data you put or share in these services can have profound practical implications in your job search, getting insurance or getting a financial loan. It is not really about hiding stuff any more. The basics of life is at stake here.

Smart people now understand this predicament and the age of indiscriminate sharing on social networks is changing slowly. If you want to have real control over your personal data than you need to have complete control over the system. Tonido provides such a system, If you want to share your kids photos or share your thoughts with family and friends without any fear, Tonido can do that for you. Using Tonido, you can create this private, safe space that runs on your device behind your home router. You will have 100% control over this private little space.

Here are the 10 things that Tonido can do to safeguard ownership, privacy and anonymity

1. No Real Name Policy — Unlike Facebook or Google, we don’t require a real name to create Tonido account. You can choose any name.
2. Completely Independent — To facilitate ease of use, we provide dynamic dns and relay server capabilities to access your Tonido device from anywhere. But if you don’t want to use our dynamic dns and relay servers you are free to do so. Here are the instructions.
3. Complete Control — Turn it On or Turn it Off any time.
4. Private and anonymous shares- Tonido allows you to create private and anonymous file shares
5. Ephemeral Shares — Tonido allows you to create time limited, ephemeral file shares that you can use to share content with friends and family
6. Guest user support — Create user accounts for your family members and friends in your own Personal Cloud
7. Works without internet — The application and data is always local. You can access your Tonido device in you home network even if there is no internet
8. Password Security — We store only your user name. we don’t store your passwords in our system. It will give you complete security to your data. Any centralized hack will not compromise your data.
9. Cross Platform and works on any device — Tonido is available for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. You don’t need an expensive HW to run Tonido — Any old computer will do.
10. Powerful Alternative to Online Services -Out of the Box, Tonido can replace Google Drive, Dropbox, Picassa, Flickr, Facebook and Spotify (If you own your music). It is extremely simple to use and comes with native mobile apps for iPhone, Android, Windows Phone and Blackberry.

In a nutshell, Tonido allows one to access, share, sync and organize personal data from anywhere without losing control over the personal data.

We are committed in our vision to make Tonido as the #1 Personal Cloud that safeguards privacy and online freedom. We are happy that our years of efforts in creating Tonido is making world a better place. We don’t have billion of users. But for a million or so Tonido users, we do make a positive difference in their lives. An active Tonido user puts order of magnitude less data in the popular online services than an average internet user. Every user that Tonido attracts is one less user for a Public cloud service. That is good enough for us.