defy.toolsWe envision a world where the individual has absolute control over who can identify and interpret their data.
This vision is broad in scope and extends to messsaging and social media posts, but also to accounting records, door bell security cameras, appliance usage data, internet browsing history, smart watch health data, and the list continues ad nauseam. Just about any and every kind of data you can imagine should be considered private and be viewable only by the individual that created it.
We believe the individual has the inalienable right to have their data be for them and them alone to decide who else has a right to see their data.
We believe that no government, commercial entity, intelligence or law enforcement agency should have the right to view any part of an individual's data without either that individual's permission or a judicially reviewed court order.
From the explosion of the internet in the 1990's to today in 2024, our world has witnessed remarkable advances in technology. We believe these technological advances have benefitted both society and the individual, but at the cost of us having lost almost all individual privacy.
If only we had not provided the entities behind this technological boom with easily readable and searchable data, they would not have been able to build their massive databases giving governments, intelligence agencies, and big corporations an instant dossier and psychological profile of almost everyone in the internet connected world.
From our current predicament we assert that there are three paths society can choose:
We hold the belief that Option 1 is completely untenable. The public and private big tech data oligarchs should have been defied and brought to heel over a decade ago.
We hold the belief that Option 2 is a good idea for many people in many areas of their lives. Everyone should all strive to be less dependent on technology in every area that they can afford to remove this dependence.
We also hold the belief the Option 2 is not a complete solution because everyone cannot afford to be completely cutoff from technology and data collection. Even if every individual made strides to remove technolgy data collection dependence from their lives to the extent possible, the remaining mandatory and essential usage would be enough for the improper data collection and surveillance state to continue to grow.
This brings us to Option 3, and logic tells us this is the only path forward if we care about the growth in power of the surveillance state. Individually and collectively, through both free market forces and activism, we must seek to design and build data collection methods that prevent others from not only reading our data, but also from knowing at all if there is even any data to read.
defy.tools is striving to be one such solution answering the call of Option 3, a system to keep our data absolutely private and unreadable to any one but ourselves and those to whom we share it.
We do not purport that our system is the only or best system to achieve the Option 3 goals, though we have not found any other project attempting the same goals. As we designed and developed defy.tools over the last half decade, we found numerous places where different decisions could be made to achieve different ends. But for this initial publishing our work, we focused simply on messaging and social media posts.
Some of the ideas and implementations beneath defy.tools go as far back as 2014, and small project in 2019. One of the roadblocks to earlier success was we needed a place to store data that people could trust.
It is our firmly held opinion data privacy should not rely on "private databases" with access controlled by a "gatekeeper". This is exactly the type of solution that has led to the current surveillance state predicament because the public and private data snooping oligarchs have steamrolled themselves right past the database gatekeepers. Instead, data should be encrypted and indexed in such a way that it could be stored in plain site, where everyone in the world can view it, but without a collection of the correct encryption keys, there is no way from anyone to know its contents or whose data it is.
Once we discovered NOSTR in 2023, we knew immediately this was the place to make our first official public effort to secure an individual's data.
Please note that though defy.tools uses NOSTR compliant relays to store data, it does not represent "NOSTR" itself. defy.tools is a toolkit that helps developers encrypt and index data in a manner that is not readable by people without your keys, which currently uses NOSTR relays to store data. defy.tools is not a NOSTR social network project in the strictest sense.
We felt it important to make this distinction.
defy.social is our social network and messaging application built using defy.tools. Each defy.social message and post uses a separate and unique single use key to sign, encrypt, and publish its data, leaving no trace of who created the data or its contents in the NOSTR relay. But all of this becomes information discernible again once the correct keys are used to query the relays and decrypt and verify its creator.
For an open source implementation, defy.demo demonstrates a very simple console messaging client. We plan to add more advanced demonstrations to this library as time and resources permit.
We plan to continue to hone and perfect the current toolkit defy.tools and continue to make defy.social as user friendly and bug free as possible, but our goals extend well past messaging and social media.
By the end of the year we plan to implement a Diet Macro Tracking application using defy.tools data. The goal here is not Diet Macro Tracking specifically, but using this app as a proof of concept for storing data for any kind of application.