Privacy

When I bought my [Lenovo Yoga 2 13](http://www.researchut.com/blog/lenovo- yoga-2-13-debian), I had great plans. I wanted a device, that I could use both, as a laptop, and also as a tablet. The path hasn’t been easy. But then, no path in Free Software against Freedom and Privacy has been easy. The choice is left to us, the users.

I had been a long time KDE User. With KDE’s decision to have different UIs for different form factors (plasma active, plasma netbook, plasma desktop), it was now time to try something different. I had 2 choices to explore: Unity and GNOME. But given that Unity is not feasible in Debian, the obvious first option to explore was GNOME. And I guess my timing was perfect. I started with 3.14 which showed great promises about touch support, followed by 3.16 and now 3.18. There ’s still a long way to go, but GNOME definitely is in the right direction and improves impressively with each release.

So I got an email yesterday from Google’s Jess Hemerly, talking about how they care about encryption

To quote a small snippet of the email:

We use locks to keep our homes and our possessions safe offline. But how can we protect our digital things, like photos on a smartphone or email traveling across the web?  **[The answer is encryption.](https://takeaction.withgoogle.com/page/m/1439db80/19cdc98/22666ed/3ed584ff/875135400/VEsE/ "http://www.facebook.com/sharer.php?u=https%3A%2F%2Fwww%2Efacebook%2Ecom%2FGoogleTakeAction%2Fvideos%2Fvb%2E924932914232399%2F939211039471253%2F&utm_medium=email&utm_source=google&utm_content=2+-+The+answer+is+encryption&utm_campaign=20150910encryption1pm&source=20150910encryption1pm")**

To change, it has to start from home. That means, add encryption support to Gmail. Add encryption to Google Photos. To every service you provide. So that, if tomorrow, your service is compromised, you don’t public our data.