Freedom Box
Description
Excerpted from: Defending Internet Freedom through Decentralization: Back to the Future? By Chelsea Barabas, Neha Narula and Ethan Zuckerman. The Center for Civic Media & The Digital Currency Initiative. MIT Media Lab, 2017
By Chelsea Barabas, Neha Narula and Ethan Zuckerman:
"In the mid-2000’s open Internet activist Eben Moglen identified control over our networked data infrastructure as the next battleground for consumer protections online. As a legal scholar, Moglen argued that the rise of cloud storage services posed a direct threat to our Fourth Amendment rights to freedom and privacy, because it removed sensitive personal information from the sacredness of the home, where we have strong privacy protections in place, to private infrastructure that is ultimately owned and operated by for-profit companies.
According to Moglen, “Everybody understands that that which you keep close is more yours to regulate and control than that which you voluntarily give away to a stranger to keep for you… So the server that protects your freedom should be in your house.” The rise of “the cloud” marked an important shift in the relationship between 58 users and the data they generate online, whereby service providers became the primary owners of both the physical infrastructure and the software that is needed to support online applications. This has serious implications for how content is published and disseminated online. In spite of these growing concerns, Moglen and other like-minded individuals struggled to gain traction with large online service providers to provide stronger privacy guarantees, such as encryption by default, to their customers. In light of these struggles, Moglen launched a project called Freedom Box in 2010, with the aim of shifting away from large, corporate owned server farms to a more community-oriented model for managing communications online. In contrast to projects with similar goals, such as Own Cloud and Media Goblin, the Freedom Box team resisted the urge to return back to the personal server model that was prominent in the early days of the web, opting instead for a more grassroots community model of service provision. According to James Vasile, former Director of the Freedom Box Foundation, a small group of users would ideally be able to access a more secure means of engaging in online activities for which they wanted better privacy guarantees, via a friendly local tech enthusiast who set up and maintained a Freedom Box for the neighborhood.
The Freedom Box itself would provide “out of the box” privacy guarantees, such as encrypted communication services. Rather than require users to download and run additional software on their own, the Freedom Box team sought to build in better default settings into hardware that consumers were already in the habit of buying. As such, they focused on building Freedom Box firmware into an affordable router. Routers were an ideal piece of technology for the Freedom Box team to focus on building around, because they are an extremely common piece of hardware that most households need to purchase in order to connect to the Internet. In addition to performing the normal functions of a router, the Freedom Box includes additional features, such as the ability to communicate between peers and filtering for advertising and malware. The hope was that by selling routers with custom firmware, the Freedom Box team would adjust the default settings for going online automatically, without requiring effort or specialized knowledge on the part of users.
Moreover, the Freedom Box project has been part of a broader push by privacy and consumer rights advocates towards supporting open, federated social networks like Diaspora. Federation is the idea of a group of organizations or individuals working together to support a common standard of operation. The goal of Diaspora, founded in 2010, was to provide a federated social network: a distributed social networking service that addressed consumer privacy concerns by enabling users to host their own content on a friendly community device, like Freedom Box. Diaspora would also serve as a social aggregator of content from more mainstream sites like Facebook, until eventually the decentralized alternative had enough traffic to stand on its own. Ultimately, one of the goals of the Freedom Box project was to mitigate the power of large social media sites like Facebook by building in support for open source projects like Diaspora by default. This would include making the Freedom Box router a node in the Diaspora network, as well as enabling easy account sign up when users are setting up their Freedom Box for the first time.
In 2013, the first Freedom Box was released on the market, combining a standard Dreamplug router with a secure digital card (SD card) with custom firmware that enabled additional ad blocking, malware detection and support for things like OpenPGP. This enabled users to leverage the web of trust for authentication of TSL/SSL communications through the use of familiar tools, such as one’s web browser or a secure shell. We were unable to find specific data on the number of users who have purchased a Freedom Box set, or downloaded the free software, but we heard anecdotally from core contributors to the project that their software had experienced fairly limited uptake. The relatively low level of adoption Freedom Box has experienced 62 is probably best attributed to nascent consumer demand for these types of products. The Freedom Box team was quite deliberate in designing their intervention around a familiar product (the router), in a way that minimized the amount of effort and technical know-how the average consumer needed to have.
Nevertheless, the Freedom Box has struggled to compete with the default freemium model of large platforms like Facebook and Amazon, whose platform services are already coupled with free data storage and identity management functionalities. This challenge is not unique to the Freedom Box project. Projects like OwnCloud and remoteStorage, as well as companies like Cozy Cloud, offer privacy-preserving cloud products and services that could support federated social media platforms, but these models for self-hosting require additional cost and effort to run, either in the form of subscription fees or set-up costs. The limited adoption of these personal cloud solutions likely points to the lack of market demand for these kinds of services.
Even if Freedom Box were able to achieve mass adoption, the most important question for us to ask is whether or not such an intervention directly addresses any of the risks regarding control over the publication and dissemination (through discovery and filtering) of speech online. The Freedom Box project aimed to give greater autonomy and control over user publishing, by shifting from corporate owned hardware to a community ownership model for storing content. They also explicitly sought to enable users to discover and filter one another’s content by supporting projects like Diaspora, which enabled a set of users to exchange information and interact within a federated framework.
In theory, Freedom Box could have lowered the barrier for users in switching over from incumbent services like Facebook to more distributed alternatives, for example by enabling the easy setup of a Diaspora account. It could have also increased user agency and the potential for interoperability, by providing the basis for a personal data store that users could use to port their data across different platforms. If, in addition, applications had adopted this data storage model, then when users wanted to switch social media platforms due to concerns over censorship or exclusion, it would be much easier to do so." (http://dci.mit.edu/assets/papers/decentralized_web.pdf)
More information
Other decentralized services:
- Diaspora, a federated social network
- Mastodon, a federated Twitter-like service
- Blockstack, a distributed system for online identity services
- IPFS (Interplanetary File System), a distributed storage service with a proposed mechanism to
incentivize resource sharing
- Solid (Social Linked Data), a linked-data protocol that could act as a back-end for data sharing
between social media networks
- Appcoins, a digital currency framework that enables users to financially participate in
ownership of platforms and protocols
- Steemit, an online community that uses an appcoin to incentivize development and community
participation in a social network