One of the micro themes in this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt was the emergence of privacy as a central part of an app’s value proposition. Sgrouples was one example of this: it used privacy to differentiate its social sharing services from everyone else’s. I came across two other startups, phriz.be and occupy.here, that take the point of view that privacy is sacred.
But phriz.be and occupy.here also believe that privacy is too important to be trusted with the Intertoobz social networks, and forget about even public and private WiFi networks. In their ultra-local privacy philosophy, it’s you and your friends (or business associates) and other trusted members of your community within haling distance of a WiFi or Bluetooth signal from a smartphone or wireless router–preferably something from the Linksys WRT54G series.
occupy.here, not surprisingly, came out of the Occupy Wall Street movement. I spoke briefly with founder Dan Phiffer while I was at TechCrunch Disrupt. His occupy.here project is open-sourced, works with off-the-shelf routers, and allows anyone to share thoughts, plans, and greetings in a completely walled-off forum. Based on a quick read of their home page, it seems they are also working on a way to let a members’ contents on one node follow them as they join other ultra-local occupy.here forums. Because no man is just a member of a forum on a teeny node, entire of itself, etc.
phriz.be is a far more polished rendering of this peer-to-peer privacy concept, though it is also based on open-source software–in this AllJoyn’s peer-to-peer file sharing platform. Phriz.be can be downloaded for either the iPhone or Android.
While business types may think this peer-to-peer sharing idea is something for kids, they should consider the fact many corporate networks and file servers are not nearly as secure and private as they may think. On a more practical level–and something I write about more extensively here–files access rights in shared folders are not nearly as restrictive as they should be. In other words, that memo you just wrote and uploaded for the head of legal can probably be viewed by many others in the company.
At least for privacy (and some other matters as well), biz executives can learn from the occupy and open-source folks.