On July 15, 2020, Twitter got hacked. The hackers gained access to a swath of high-profile individuals’ accounts like Elon Musk and Joe Biden, and used that access to scam other users into handing over bitcoin. Having coincidentally written about decentralized social media the day before the hack, I thought it would be a good idea to further break down what decentralization means.
Presenting ourselves to the world comes with inherent risk. With every piece of ourselves we share online, we risk compromising our personal privacy and security. We show our faces, share our feelings, and sometimes engage in difficult discussions. The beauty of social media is that the global community can, for the first time in history, engage in the same discussion all at once. The new connections we make and old ones we maintain through social media more often than not outweigh the risk. Yet, scrutiny and periodic reevaluation of the platforms we use to share our lives is vital to maintaining an open and trusted medium of communication. If the last decade has taught us anything, it's that social media platforms of yore are no longer providing a beneficial service that outweighs the immense damage they've caused to our privacy.
The office suite on our computers functions like a physical notebook and pen. We write our ideas, create charts, and perform calculations in our notebooks to save and sometimes share with others. The office suite familiar to most is Microsoft Office. Regardless of whether you buy a Mac or Windows machine, buying the Microsoft Office suite of tools is almost always a necessity. If you’ve ever bought a new computer, you’ve inevitably performed the Microsoft license dance. Maybe you check if your family and friends have a spare license you can use. You might even ask a niece or nephew if they can purchase a license for you with their student discounts. In the end, you are beholden to Microsoft for your everyday digital notebook needs.
Almost anyone with internet access has a personal and a professional email address through which hundreds of emails are exchanged weekly. With the ubiquity of email in the online ecosystem, it is important that we ensure our emails are kept private. One of the most common email providers is Google through their Gmail service. Gmail provides a host of features that are enticing and highly valuable. Between their ability to provide near unlimited storage and additional access to the Google suite of external tools, it’s the go-to email provider for many people. However, with every Google service there is a catch. Google is only able to provide comprehensive products for free because they use and sell the data they collect from you in exchange for that access.