Another one of Blackstone's properties: Change Healthcare, a leading independent healthcare technology company that provides data and analytics-driven solutions to improve clinical, financial and patient engagement outcomes.
Great points. My biggest worry is that it normalizes the idea of constantly being monitored to children, who are then less likely to care if it continues to happen as an adult.
Interesting that the article mentions why people would do this (much, much cheaper) but avoids talking about any possible solutions to rising rent costs in urban areas.
I use keybase.io for file storage, as well as chatting other people on the service, but it can't chat out so isn't all that useful for communication.
Protonmail for email
As far as android is concerned the only real alternative is apple. They have their own privacy concerns but at least its possible to create a relatively secure device. Android has a few projects being worked on to fix this, but nothing solid yet (eelo is a good example).
Maps is the hard one for me. I haven't been able to find a privacy respecting alternative. By the nature of the application you have to provide some kind of location data. If you're really trying to cut it out you can just get a list of directions from a start to end point and follow that, but i don't recommend this because it encourages more distracted driving.
DuckDuckGo.com for search, at a g! to any query to have it redirect to google if you can't get the results you need, but most things DDG will find just fine.
For documents I use an skinned emacs called Spacemacs, but that isn't something i'd recommend to everyone and doesn't address problems like live document editing with others.
tl;dr its just really, really hard and inconvenient to keep your data under your control and requires constant vigilance
Edit: Oh and signal works really well for text. It can replace the default messenger on an android phone and encrypt any messages to other signal users transparently while still sending and reading regular texts
I like a lot of Mastodon's ideas, but whats to stop if from going the same way as Diaspora?
Had this thought because i just had it open, but couldn't something like keybase just add this on top of their existing identity platform? I feel like the only missing critical feature is the ability for different instances to interact as a federation. Which, now that i think about it, would be really cool.
You think you are making a good counter argument with the relation to software, but there is a sizable population of developers who believe exactly this, that throwing out copyright is a good thing. Currently most if not all software is created using previously written code that developers find from other developers online, like on stack overflow. None of them actually think to pay a poster on stack overflow for their solution, and systems like that wouldn't survive if they had to. You would have much more support for your deal than you might realize.
This is a false equivalence fallacy. Developers solve problems that businesses run into, whatever they may be, not just pump out code. Also, the solutions they come up with make use of a massive public domain of previously solved problems, like on stack overflow. If software had the same culture of copyright that music has today's technology would be equivalent to what we had in the 80's. The open source community is a glaring example of why you're analogy is so flawed, because there are many developers who believe open access to information is a good thing and that their skills are still valuable even if their work isn't copyrightable, and they do more than just believe this, they live their lives that way.