The why, what and how of owning your own data

Cloud has been a revolution. We access our data wherever we are via web interface, apps on mobile devices or desktop and share and communicate via services like twitter, flickr, imgur, facebook, pinterest... The Cloud makes life easier and more fun.

Is this data available to government? Absolutely. Can advertisers mine it? Oh yes. Is it available to anybody with money? Probably. Can hackers get to it? Not unlikely. It is all in one or a few places: easy to demand access to for the government (both foreign and local), to be bought by companies or stolen by thieves.

Think about this: The government knows your political opinions. Your insurance knows your medical history and what you do in your free time. Your bank knows you didn't finish your study. A potential employer knows if your wife wants to get pregnant. And a step further - what can they DO with access to those servers? Is it possible to control what comments from friends show up in your news feed on Facebook, what articles show up on websites you visit? It sure is!

This is not how the internet was designed. It was meant to be a place where data was everywhere, not stored in a few locations. Federation would be the norm, not the exception.

We need to find and build solutions to get our privacy back, bring our data home. In this talk, I'll discuss both the advantages and the dangers of the cloud and present to you a piece which can help solve the puzzel: ownCloud.

The ownCloud community is building a federated and distributed network. Everyone can run an ownCloud server at home or somewhere on the internet and collaborate and share with everyone else. ownCloud can already be used to provide file access, syncing, sharing, calendar, contacts, music and video streaming, RSS reader and all kinds of other services in a distributed way.

With ownCloud you can sync & share your files, calendar, contacts and more. Access your data from all your devices, on an open platform you can extend and modify. You determine how your private data is shared. Your data – under your control.