How Much Is A Little Privacy Worth?

There has never been a more perfect time to start being proactive about privacy than this moment, right now, at the end of 2016. The surveillance state is out of control—and it's currently being overseen by a relatively sane administration. Just think about how a Trump presidency might want to put to use the vast troves of personal data about you and your interests. A number of thoughts come to mind, and there isn't a pretty one in the bunch.

And it goes even further. A staggering 1.6 billion private records were leaked in 2016, and that's just from the breaches we actually know about. It's quite safe to say that many, many more records than that were leaked or stolen this year. Almost certainly, somewhere, some amount of your data has been made public, or has been stolen in order to be put to use toward who-knows-what end.

The clowns are running the clown asylum, and we just elected Bozo to be their leader.

It seems many of us have decided that a few tradeoffs are OK; we'll take a free service in exchange for a little data about our children and our religious beliefs. What's the harm? This strikes me as an exceedingly insane bargain, especially given the first two paragraphs above. Would you accept free plumbing services so long as the plumber is allowed to peek through your underwear drawer? Would you like to trade a photo of your junk for a sandwich (sit down, Anthony Weiner)? How do you know the plumber won't walk away with a pair of those undies? What happens to the junk photo three days from now when your sandwich is long gone?

These may sound like intentionally extreme examples, but if you think about the kinds of data we routinely put online, you'll see my examples aren't so silly after all. Why are online services any different from this kind of stuff? What's so wrong with paying $1 for something you like?

Things don't really need to be this way. It's easy to imagine an Internet where you pay a very few bucks in exchange for use of a service with the knowledge that nothing personal about you will be stashed and / or stolen from the servers in question. It would seem that all of the above leads us to a perfect time to launch a service like ours, and that's what we're doing today.

We don't store anything about you except an email address (and hell, type "bozo476@clowncollege.balls" into the email field for all I care, so long as you can log into it at least once and confirm the address is yours). There's nothing about you to be leaked or stolen. And we're funded by subscriptions, so we have no reason to try and find things about you to sell.

Just go sign up. Thanks for reading.