Surviving in the Age of Surveillance

On his blog, David Sparks a.k.a. MacSparky paints a dark picture of today’s world:

At this point, governments (and companies looking to monetize you) are punching holes in the Internet much faster than the folks trying to protect your privacy can patch them. (…) All that said, I’m not sure how you escape it in the modern world. We live in an age of mass surveillance, whether you realize it or not.

And David is right. We can only watch out and base our decisions what products to use and which services to trust on smart choices. And what he suggests is pretty much in line with an article we published here in January 2020.

In our article we talk a lot about encryption but not so much about ourselves. Like David, we strongly encourage you to judge companies, including us, by their actions. As a company, we have no investors influencing our business decisions and we currently have no intention to get bought. We charge for our products and do not plan to change our business model to one that needs to monetizes your data. Consequently, our products are designed to store and handle your data locally. If DEVONthink sends data over the network or to a cloud service it encrypts the data so that neither the cloud service provider nor us will ever be able to make any sense of it.

So if your care about privacy — and you should — we strongly suggest that you read the two linked articles and give them a thought. Maybe it’s unavoidable that we are tracked if we don’t want to get stuck using yesterday’s technologies. But we can at least make it harder for the trackers.