It can feel very overwhelming to consider the depth and breadth of your digital footprint for the first time.
What even is a “digital footprint”?
Imagine a trail of data breadcrumbs created as a result of your online activity. Websites visited, Google searches, social media posts and comments, any online interaction.
Your digital footprint is a unique set of traceable digital activities, actions, contributions, and communications manifested on the Internet or digital devices.
Preserved in time, on the internet, forever.
It stands to reason that especially in the burgeoning age of artificial intelligence, as instances of identity theft continue to trend higher exponentially, you may wish to reduce your risk of becoming a victim in the future.
Today we examine three straightforward and reliable open source tools for any newly minted sovereign individual to begin reclaiming their digital identity.
Bitwarden is an open-source password manager that helps you securely store and manage all your passwords in one place. It allows you to generate strong, unique passwords for each account, automatically fill in login details, and sync your data across devices.
You can self host your own version (called Vaultwarden) using a lightweight implementation of the Bitwarden server API.
SimpleLogin is an open-source email alias service that protects your online privacy by creating unique email addresses for each of your online registrations. Instead of giving out your real email address, you generate an alias that forwards messages to your actual inbox, preventing spam and safeguarding your identity.
You can easily manage and block aliases, ensuring full control over your email communication.
Home Assistant is an open-source home automation platform that enables you to control and automate devices in your home from a single, unified interface. It supports just about any smart devices and integration you can think of, allowing you to create custom automations and routines to enhance your home.
You maintain full control over your data by running the software locally.
All of the above tools have one thing in common - open source.
Using open-source software ensures transparency, security, and control over your digital applications.
The code is publicly available, allowing anyone to inspect, modify, and improve it.
Even if you’re not a developer you receive the benefit of countless others pouring over the code to ensure the software does what it says on the tin.
Self-hosting allows you to run applications and services on your own hardware instead of relying on third-party cloud service providers.
In exchange for self-hosting, you get complete control over your data, enhanced privacy, and can reduce your expenses by cutting subscription costs.
There are also emerging decentralised protocols, such as Nostr, that distribute data across multiple servers (or relays) to provide censorship resistance. The protocol is permissionless, so anyone can build on top of it and the public key cryptography at the base layer provides genuine ownership to the user over his or her content.
Nostr is early in its development lifestyle but there are almost limitless applications for its use beyond social media.
More to come on that front. Thanks for reading.