Part 2

Proof of Autonomy

Why autonomy matters

Your digital life is rented

Your email address belongs to your mail provider, your photos sit on the servers of a company, and your contacts, your followers and 10 years of conversations live inside platforms. What you have is an account, which means a permission to use all of this, and a permission can be withdrawn.

It happens in ordinary ways. In August 2022, the New York Times told the story of a father in San Francisco who had photographed his sick toddler for the doctor. An automated system flagged the pictures, Google disabled his account, and he lost his email, his contacts, his photos and his phone number. The police cleared him, and Google still refused to give the account back.

Other losses are quieter. A platform changes its rules, a price doubles, an algorithm changes and the audience you built over years stops seeing your posts. A service shuts down, as Google Reader did on 1 July 2013 and the consumer version of Google+ on 2 April 2019, and everything built on it goes with it. None of this requires bad intentions, because when you rent, someone else decides and you adapt.

Why alternatives to Google and Big Tech matter

A handful of companies now sit between you and almost everything you do, from search, mail and maps to the system on your phone, the store where you get your apps, payments and social networks. Most of them are very good at what they do, and the difficulty lies elsewhere, in concentration.

A company that carries so much becomes a single point of failure. On 19 July 2024, a faulty update from the security company CrowdStrike crashed about 8.5 million Windows computers, according to Microsoft, and airlines, banks and hospitals were disrupted on the same day. The same company becomes a single point of censorship, since a decision made by it or imposed on it can remove an app or a voice for millions of people. It also becomes a single point of surveillance, with 1 database that knows what you search, where you go, who you write to and what you buy.

Using alternatives does not mean leaving everything tomorrow. Alternatives only exist as long as some people use them, fund them and report their bugs, so each time you choose one you help keep it alive for everybody, and you give yourself an exit.

When a law can order your services to scan

The regulation that the European Commission proposed on 11 May 2022, known as "Chat Control", would allow authorities to order a messaging service to detect child sexual abuse material in private communications. For the encrypted messengers of chapter 1, that would in practice mean analysing messages on your device before they are encrypted. As of September 2026 the text is still being negotiated, and the round of 29 June 2026 ended without agreement.

The temporary rule that lets providers scan voluntarily shows how such a file moves, since the Parliament refused to extend it on 26 March 2026 and it lapsed after 3 April, then the Council had it reinstated on 23 July 2026 until 3 April 2028, this time without end-to-end encrypted communications.

Protecting children is a legitimate aim, and the debate is about the method. Such an order is addressed to a company, which complies, contests it or leaves the market. A protocol run by many independent operators, and open source software that you can run, fork or replace, offer no single desk where it can be served, and leave you a working alternative if a service you depend on has to change what it does.

Sovereignty is a practical word

Sovereignty sounds like a big political word. Here it means the ability to say no and the ability to leave, and in practice it rests on 3 things.

You hold the keys. Your identity and your access depend on a secret that only you have, instead of an account that a company can close.

Your data can move. It is stored in open formats that you can export and open elsewhere, so changing service is an inconvenience, not a catastrophe.

Your tools are open source, as far as possible. When the code is public, anyone can copy it and continue it, which makes it much harder to take away from you, even if its authors give up or are bought. This book says so when a tool is not fully open source.

Behind these 3 things sits the question that runs through this book, which is who the trusted third party is, and whether you can check what it does. An account places that trust in a single company, whereas keys, open formats and public code either remove the third party or let you verify it and replace it, usually at the price of some convenience.

The theme of the conference, "Take back your sovereignty", describes this position, which has little to do with isolation or distrust. It is the situation of someone who stays by choice and could leave tomorrow.

Decentralised, open technology has also been tested in crises, when central systems fail or are turned against people, and Alexis Roussel's talk at PROOF draws its lessons from Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

What you can do about it

Nobody replaces 10 years of habits in a weekend, and nobody needs to. Autonomy is built 1 service at a time, starting where the dependence worries you most or where the change is easiest.

You do not have to be absolute either. Keeping a Google account for the 2 things you really need it for, while your mail, your photos and your contacts live elsewhere, is already a very different situation from having everything in the same place.

The 6 chapters of this part go from the idea to the practice:

  1. Keys instead of accounts: how a secret that only you hold can replace a login that a company controls.
  2. Nostr: an open network without a company in charge: an identity and an audience that do not depend on any single platform.
  3. Replacing Big Tech services, one at a time: search, maps, cloud, documents, photos, with several options for each.
  4. Taking back control of your phone: the device that knows the most about you, and what you can change on it.
  5. Hosting your own services: for those who want to go further, your own small server at home.
  6. AI without giving yourself away: what AI assistants learn about you, and how to run one on your own device.

Chapters 6 and 7 belong together. The others are independent, so you can start with the one that fits your life today.

Sources

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