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About us

Who we are, our motivation and policies

1 - Team

Our team, contributors and like-minded people

About us

International team of independent professionals:

  • Zholnay Kirill - Founder/CEO/CISO. For more than 15 years builds and protects corporate infrastructure in medium and large companies
  • Dettlaff - core-team backend developer
  • Houkime - core-team backend developer
  • Inex Code - core-team full-stack developer
  • NaiJi - core-team Flutter developer
  • ilchub - DevOps, Backend developer
  • kherel - Flutter developer
  • nikolai - QA Engineer
  • and a lot of cool contributors and volunteers

We get help

Like-minded people

  • Cloudron - commercial project, code closed, from $15 per month for email and multiple services. You have to install the application yourself on the server, keep an eye on the server resources;
  • IndieWeb - open-source project, complicated in configuration;
  • Kubenav - a promising tool for managing Docker containers for highly skilled users;
  • Yunohost - an open-source project for manual installation on a server;
  • FreedomBox - an open-source project for manual installation on a server;
  • Turnkeylinux - ready-to-use software for experienced users;
  • Lunni - a commercial open-source project;
  • Softaculous - a commercial closed-source project.

Useful

2 - Motivation

Why we do it and what we want to achieve

Every internet user is forced to use centralized services sacrificing privacy and personal freedoms:

As a result, users:

  • Accept incomprehensible license agreements;
  • Endure ads;
  • Hand over their data to unknown entities;
  • Become trapped in a “recommendation bubble”;
  • Are subjected to censorship and blocking.

When we use centralized services, such as popular social networks, we place our trust in the administrators of these platforms. They store our conversations, our photos, and even our most important secrets shared in chats with loved ones. We allow them to analyze our interests and communications to deliver targeted advertising. Often, the data collected leaks into the public domain due to a company breach or an untrustworthy employee. We become dependent on centralized solutions, which can permanently ban your account without explanation due to a simple spam filter failure, along with all the data accumulated over the years.

We want digital independence and privacy for our data.

Our mission is to offer an alternative. Your services - your rules:

  • No license agreements, advertisements, surveillance, telemetry, bans, or censorship;
  • Your data is stored on your server and belongs solely to you.

Why do we need this?

Our team consists of programmers and system administrators from various countries. Perhaps we are romantics, the Don Quixotes of the free internet. It is important for us not only to complete the work but also to understand its impact — contributing to a positive change in people’s attitudes toward privacy and independence.

The primary motivation behind SelfPrivacy, guiding our team, is to make internet usage a bit more comfortable, a bit simpler, and — most importantly — a bit more private.

Privacy is an inherent human right that allows us to feel like subjects, independent individuals. We are creating a public project to draw inspiration for new features and identify errors not through the efforts of a few individuals but by leveraging the resources of an unlimited audience. After all, why does a musician compose melodies, and an artist create paintings? Moreover, developing a free, open solution capable of elevating users to a new level of privacy is a matter of honor. And samurai do not have a goal — they only have a path.

3 - Roadmap

What we are going to do next

The following is a list of our tasks in no particular order, grouped by topics. This is a living document that will change over time.

Tasks in bold are sponsored, for example, by NlNet. Tasks in italic are in our current focus.

SP Nix flake format

Single sign on (SSO)

  • Analyze protocols supported by different services. (LDAP, oAuth, OIDC, …)
  • Compare different SSO solutions, choose the most appropriate.
  • Implement Nix modules to integrate the selected SSO solution with the services we install.
  • Add support for the SSO administration on the SelfPrivacy API and app side.
  • Develop the self-service portal for the users.

Security

  • Harden the systemd units
  • System security audit logging
  • GUI to view the audit log events
  • Monitoring
  • Alerts

Automatic backups

  • Implement the new backups subsytem on the API in the storage-agnostic way
  • Implement automatic backups and rotation
  • Implement automatic restoration from the snapshot
  • Allow recreating the server on the new machine using the backup automatically
  • Automatic migration between machines

Add services

  • Self-hosting a static website (selfprivacy#17)
  • LibreOffice online
  • BigBlueButton
  • Corteza
  • Flarum
  • FileSender
  • GoToSocial
  • GNU Social
  • KBin
  • Funkwhale
  • Castopod
  • Mastodon
  • UnifiedPush provider (for example, ntfy)
  • Matrix server
  • VPN (Collaboration with leap.se is possible)

Provisioning

  • Refactor the provisioning logic
    • Backup credentials are no longer need during setup (selfprivacy#370)
    • Providers’ credentials are no longer needed to communicate with an existing server
    • It is possible to update the token
  • Multitenancy
  • The installation progress can be tracked by the app
  • More tools to debug failed installation

Manual installer (support for bare metal)

While cloud server providers offer APIs that allow us to perform almost fully automated server installation, it is not true self-hosting, if you can’t install the system on your own hardware. The installer shall be developed to allow deploying SelfPrivacy on systems where APIs are not available. There will be UX challenges on how to make this process as simple to the end user as possible. In the end, the user shall be able to control their server from the mobile SelfPrivacy app just like if they installed it using the cloud provider.

New providers (server)

  • Scaleway
  • We’re open for suggestions!

New providers (DNS)

  • Porkbun
  • We’re open for suggestions!

New providers (backup storage)

  • SFTP
  • Restic REST server
  • We’re open for suggestions!

System management

  • Track the progress of system rebuilds
  • Allow deleting old system generations from GUI
  • API to read logs from the services

App reactivity

  • Handle situations when the server is offline
  • Use websockets to keep information updated in real time

Localization and accessibility

  • Translate server-side messages to the client’s language
  • Make sure the app is fully usable with a keyboard
  • Make sure the app is compliant with WCAG

Publishing

  • Publish on Google Play
  • Publish on Apple App Store

4 - Donations

Donate to Selfprivacy

Unfortunately, you can’t make a mass product on enthusiasm. Many choose to go the commercial route, but that imposes limitations:

  • A focus on making money, not privacy
  • Willingness to sell out to a mega-corporation
  • Functionality dictated by market, marketing, buzzwords.

The best option is regular funding. At least $1 a month.

As of 2019, I’m investing a noticeable chunk of my family budget and time into the project. Because I am confident in the necessity of SelfPrivacy.

— Kirill Zholnay (Founder)

All donations will go to the development of the project and decent pay for the team. We, like any other opensource project, live off donations.

💸 Liberapay: For regular payments

https://liberapay.com/SelfPrivacy.org

5 - Privacy Policy

Our policies and politics

Last updated: May 15, 2023

This SelfPrivacy (“SelfPrivacy” or “we” or “us” or “our”) privacy policy (the “Privacy Policy”) is designed to help you understand what information we collect, including information that directly or indirectly identifies an individual (“personal information”), and how we use or share that information.

We take your privacy very seriously, and we are committed to ensuring that your personal information is kept safe and secure. This Privacy Policy explains how we manage your personal information when you use our application.

We want to keep it simple, and we don’t want to hide behind long paragraphs of text, small lines or difficult words.

SelfPrivacy is an open-source project. Please note that we are neither the data controller nor the data processor for any data processing operations carried out through our application. We do not have control over how users utilize the application or how they process any data that they may choose to host or store through the application. As such, we cannot be held responsible for any data processing activities carried out by our users. We encourage all users to carefully consider their data processing activities and to comply with applicable data protection laws and regulations.

Collection of Information

Our application does not collect any personal information from you. We do not collect your name, email address, or any other contact information. We also do not collect any technical information about your device, including your IP address, operating system, or browser type.

SelfPrivacy does not collect limited service and usage data like error and diagnostics information, security alerts, and log file reports associated with device identifiers. We refer to this information as “telemetry data,” and it does not include any end user personal identifiers or message contents.

We collect access logs to determine our user count and the countries they are visiting from. However, we store visitor IP addresses as subnets (x.x.x.0) which may not be sufficient to uniquely identify individuals. Although we cannot guarantee that our server provider does not collect meta-information, we advise users to use methods of traffic anonymization for added privacy.

Tracking

Our application provides users with the necessary tools to create self-hosted services, such as web servers or databases, without requiring them to provide any personal information. We do not track users’ activities or behaviors within the application, and we do not use cookies or other tracking technologies.

Third-party service providers

We have no control over the personal information that users provide to third-party service providers when opting for self-hosted services. Our application initiates interactions with third-party service providers only after the user has selected them. When users consent to allow third-party service providers to collect and process personal information about their online activities using cookies, pixels, local storage, and other technologies, we are not accountable for the privacy practices of these third parties. This Privacy Policy does not cover the information practices of these third parties.

Use of Information

Since we do not collect any personal information from you, we cannot use it for any purpose. Our application is designed to allow you to set up and use self-hosted services without the need for any personal information. We do not use your information for marketing purposes.

Disclosure of Information

Since we do not collect any personal information from you, we cannot disclose it to anyone. We do not share your personal information with any third parties.

Protection of Information

We take the security of your personal information very seriously. Even though we do not collect any personal information about you, we still use industry-standard security measures to protect our application and the data it contains. We use encryption, firewalls, and other security measures to protect your information from unauthorized access, disclosure, alteration, or destruction.

Changes to this Privacy Policy

We may update this Privacy Policy from time to time to reflect changes in our practices or to comply with legal requirements. We encourage you to review this Privacy Policy regularly to stay informed about how we collect, use, and protect your personal information.

Contact Us

If you have any questions or concerns about our Privacy Policy or the collection, use, or disclosure of your personal information, please contact us at privacy@selfprivacy.org. We will do our best to address your concerns in a timely and satisfactory manner.

We are pleased to offer this Privacy Policy under Creative Commons Zero license as a template that can be used by anyone in the open-source community. We hope that this contribution will help to support the development of privacy policies that promote transparency, accountability, and respect for the privacy of individuals. As part of our commitment to open-source values, we believe in sharing knowledge and resources to foster innovation and collaboration. Therefore, we encourage others to adapt and modify our privacy policy to meet their specific needs, while ensuring that they comply with applicable laws and regulations.

Licensed under CC0