It’s Getting Easier to Ditch the Tech Giants and Host Your Own Data

Instead of fighting with your own servers, arcOS hopes to help you build your own cloud. Via msarturir/Flickr

An upswing of the whole government spying scandal is that it’s thrown some momentum behind the idea of re-decentralizing the web, and giving users a way to take back control of their own data. Six months ago the pitch for an open-source, Raspberry Pi-based self-hosted home server would have made even hackers’ eyes glaze over. But today the idea of saying screw Google and Facebook and the NSA and DIY-ing your internet experience is actually turning heads.

Unfortunately, it’s not going to turn many heads until the process of running your own home server gets way less technically complicated. That’s what arcOS is trying to do. It’s a new project to offer a simple, easy-to-use self-hosted server, to shield your personal information from increasingly powerful tech giants and the government agencies snooping around in their networks.

ArcOS is the latest newcomer to the field of privacy startups encouraging internet users to opt out of the surveillance state. The concept is similar to, for example, Tails, a desktop operating system that’s also based on Linus and uses Tor to assure security. Or Mailpile, an encrypted email client trying to out-perform the cloud.

That’s the biggest snag in the grand plan to decentralize the web, Cook told me. “Email is the elephant in the room of every data privacy conversation. If you are self-hosting your email ONLY and not coupling that with a form of encryption like PGP, your emails will still be visible via anyone who has access to the remote server. So your alternative is to email people who *also* have their email properly self-hosted and encrypted, or to not use email at all. That sucks, but unfortunately it is a limitation of the format.”

The technology to create one’s own cloud already exists, but the process is too complex to have taken hold outside hardcore privacy techie circles. The so-called revolutionary aspect of the project is Genesis, an intuitive user interface that makes the process of hosting your own web services easy to setup and manage from start to finish.

In a nutshell, arcOS is a small device about the size of a credit card that plugs into your home ethernet jack. It uses a Linux-based operating system and private “cloud” that runs on the Raspberry Pi hardware. It will be able to host publishing platforms, email, content and file-sharing, and all the other services that are fast moving to the cloud. In a sense, it’s the anti-cloud.

So says the brains behind the project, a 23-year-old computer engineer and privacy advocate, Jacob Cook. He’s got an alpha version of the device out now and just launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise the money for a more robust version, which will incorporate with Tor and other partner services.

Frankly, I’m not convinced the digital citizenry is quite ready to give up convenience for privacy, even post-NSA and even if the arcOS comes out looking slick and intuitive enough to do Steve Jobs proud. But I also wouldn’t be surprised if in the not-too-distant future, private servers are as commonplace as the desktop computers sitting in your home office.

That said, Cook believes that a self-hosting trend could make a difference for the future of how our personal data is stored and used on the internet, even if it never actually replaces Google and Co., by putting pressure on the tech giants to drive home the point that users don’t like how they’re handling their data. “To those ends it can function much like a consumer movement,” said Cook. “Which can bring more change to all services, decentralized or not.”