October 17, 2018 in 421 words

If you’re worried about online privacy, you no longer have an excuse

_{^{AT THE HELM}}

_{The Helm private server is meant to blend into your life.}

How do you pay for Gmail, Google Maps, or Facebook?

You probably use these services, or similar ones, every day, and don’t think they cost you a thing to use. But really, they do—just about every web service that isn’t selling you something is selling you to someone else. Your data, whether that’s facts about you, pictures you share, places you go, messages you post, emails you send, or anything else, is being read by a machine (and sometimes humans) to figure out what best to advertise to you.

Google scans your emails to market products to you; it tracks your location when driving to show you where to pull over to buy things; Facebook analyzes everything you put on the social network to provide a complete picture of you to sell to advertisers. These online systems that billions of people willingly hand over their data to can be compromised—30 million Facebook users just had their accounts hacked. Why, exactly, are we giving that data away for free?

A new startup, called Helm, doesn’t believe we should.

The company has been toiling away in secret for three years working on its first product, a small personal server that anyone can set up in minutes to create their own private, secure email account. There’ll be no prying eyes, no one trying to sell you anything, and a slim chance of it ever being hacked.

Giri Sreenivas, the founder of Helm and a veteran of multiple security companies, told Quartz that he believes the email address is the cornerstone of our digital identities—we use it as our login for our banking, our utilities, our social media, our insurance—so it’s not something we should hand over so easily to large tech companies whose motivations may not match our own. He’s been running his own personal server for years, and his inspiration for setting up the company came after the 2013 revelations from Edward Snowden about how the US National Security Agency (NSA) was snooping on regular citizens’ data. Seeing how undervalued and over-examined our own personal data is on the internet, and how difficult it is to set up any sort of private server without technical chops, Sreenivas and his co-founder Dirk Sigurdson set out to change that. …

_{Ed. I’m looking into this personally, I’m not presently endorsing it.}

_{Ed. More tomorrow? Possibly. Maybe. Probably Not?}