Are you concerned by your privacy and the security of your files ?

I mean, you are basically giving away everything you store to some big companies. That will read it and analyze it.

Why should they read it anyways ? Your data is your data and you deserve to have control over it. It's as if the mailman red your mail before handing it to you.

We store lots of worthless files like that essay from 2004 or your monopoly game score. But it can quickly get more serious, photos of you, medical papers, bills, anything related to your identity, your political views...

Then they have this perfect profile of you. You have disease x ? Here is an ad for that, or this pharma company will call you. On your photos, They see that you like eating/drinking that, do you want more (amazon recommendation suddenly gets filled up). Same for travel etc etc etc.

You may think "oh I don't care if google/xxxx knows all that" but it's not google, it's google AND its partners which have partners as well. And before you even access your uploaded files, the whole world knows what you uploaded and starts to profit from it.

This may not affect you now, but if you teach them to recognize you on a photo, in the near future they will recognize you in videos, surveillance cameras etc. Once they have your "internet fingerprint" it's kind of over. Whatever you will do it's going to be sucked for profit. And it's not just you, your friends&Family too.

Of course it sounds dramatic but if you saw the snowden leaks we are very, very close to this future.

How to protect myself from that.

So we need 3 caracteristics from our cloud :

• Control of the server holding the data.
• Encryption of the actual data.
• An open source app.

There are several solutions. The best is not finished yet, it's SiaCoin. A decentralized encrypted storage is everything you can wish for.

But we don't want to go all techie. We want the same service as dropbox/google/microsoft But with control over it, that's it.

there are a lot of dropbox-like but the best one (in my humble opinion) is Owncloud

OwnCloud

As his names indicates, this software creates a user friendly interface just like Google Drive. While remaining open source.

There are TONS of apps that you can add to your OwnCloud :

• You need a calendar ?
• a todo list ? With reminders ?
• Link your files with a direct link ?
• Stream videos/music directly from the cloud ?
• etc etc.

Owncloud basically set-up a store where everyone can contribute and add his own app. So there is everything you can wish for.

You can even set up a collaborative storage with accounts and a large control over them. For example you could take 5 friends and buy a 500go server and all of your 5 friends will get a independent cloud storage of 100 go. Each one with an account etc.

To see everything that's possible look here : Features

Installation

You have 2 choices :

• Run Owncloud at home on a NAS.
• Run Owncloud on a Virtual Private Server (VPS)

NAS

Running it on a NAS is obviously the best solution as you actually manage the hard drive that hosts your data. For OwnCloud is perfect.
But : it can be pretty expensive and you have to open your network to the outside and it can be quite the struggle and dangerous. Plus your uptime is not guaranteed. If you have an internet problem or some electric errors you loose your cloud.

VPS

First things first, you need to look which provider you choose. If you pick like an amazon server you loose all the advantages you had. Look up some privacy oriented vps sellers owncloud has a nice list try to look for one that has a lot of space, cpu and ram doesn't really matters and monthly bandwidth is obviously important as well.

"What's the point if we rent the server ? The host can just steal my files"

The point is that you can encrypt your files on the server. Meaning that even if they steal your data, it's unusable !

So even if they want to screw you they won't access your data.

Installation (actual one)

The installation is very simple, documentation and help is HUGE. Feel free to talk to me in the comments if there is anything wrong.

Basically setup a LAMP STACK

Download OwnCloud Server edition and follow the guide Installation guide more specifically This one

Of course I made a basic summary in a three links, search online if you need a complete tutorial from start to finish :)

Thanks for reading.