Privacy Revolutions — The Neone Story pt. 1

Privacy Revolutions — The Neone Story pt. 1

We Were Private Before Private Was Cool

Privacy is king! Privacy is dead! Long live privacy? When Facebook declares that “The Future Is Private” you know something has changed. But are these claims a roadmap or just positioning rhetoric? It also makes you wonder, why wasn’t it private from the start? Because we have focused on privacy from the beginning. In fact we started building a private platform seven years ago.

With the emergence of the web in the 1990s and early 2000s, individuals were able to connect to anyone or any group — a social communications revolution. But anyone running a website or public-facing servers also came to understand that accompanying assumptions around privacy and anonymity were greatly overstated.

And then social networks happened. While the web promised decentralized communication, social sites by design pulled in the opposite direction. Social platform aggregated shared thoughts, relationships, likes and dislikes in a centralized system, ripe for mining and misuse. So around 2010 we started pondering what sort of system we might create to address these issues, and in 2012 we decided upon a solution.

I hired a design firm to help me go from idea to product. Here is part of what I wrote them as a design document in October of 2012

Social networks provide ways to share information, and connect with the people in our lives. Cloud storage and services provide ubiquitous access to our files and media, allowing us to always have access to the information and media we create and collect.

However these abilities come with a cost. When we share our lives with our friends, we are also sharing our lives with marketers and data miners. When we store our information in remote clouds, we lose the ability to ensure they are private and secure. Our personal pictures, communications, and interests are all being sifted, creating digital profiles that we have little to no control over other than not to participate.

The conundrum of sharing vs. privacy continues, protestations by Facebook, Twitter et al. notwithstanding. But a set of fundamental issues prevents social sites from truly respecting your privacy: Who pays for the servers? Who funds social app development? Who maintains and services the platforms? Social sites are not public utilities, they are, for better or worse, business with profit motives (if not always viable business models).

Moreover social networks require infrastructure, and find common paths to monetizing it. Most of today’s social networks look towards advertising to pay for that infrastructure. And these social platforms attract advertisers with information about you, the user. So as long as ad-based business models rule, you will be the product.

At Neone we don’t data mine our users, you are are not the product. We have always believed people should control their own data. Because privacy is more than a product, it’s what allows us to be ourselves.

In parts 2 and 3 I will go into detail about the Neone architecture, and what our vision is for the future.