· Michael Antensteiner · Philosophy · 2 min read
Welcome to AppSpark!
Humane Software for the web. We want to create useful web tools that are fair in regards to the people that use them. We love the internet, but the current application-model is broken, because it is not honest.
Useful web tools that respect a person.
Many providers of applications for the web and app-stores build their businesses around monetizing our data in various ways and for us users it is not clear who has access to our data. It’s not transparent and regulation does not help, because reading and accepting pages of Privacy Policies is nothing we want to do and just destroys usabilty.
We need control over our data in a way where
the default approach to our data is ‘everything private’ we choose what parts of information we want to make public and share by name/pseudonym or anonymous we know who has access to what parts of our data the costs of a service are transparent and clear. If we - at AppSpark - say we want to ‘liberate’ people, we mean to free them from the hidden advertising model and the surveillance it brings, which is in our view unethical and does no good for society in the long run. Another problem is, that we as users have to trust external parties - like big corporations and even goverments - to respectfully handle and protect our data. Sadly history has taught us that if there is a way to abuse or exploit a system it will be done. The conclusion is that it’s very risky and better avoided to trust external parties with our sensitive information. Everything has tradeoffs, as users we have to decide how we pay for the costs of a service. A ‘free’ service is rarely free, it often comes with the cost of compromising our privacy, which is not upfront clear to many people.
At AppSpark we are on the mission to provide ethical Software and Services. We aim to create useful tools & apps that help and improve the life of people while being safe to use by design. In the last decade a lot of technological advances fields of cryptography, distributed systems and hardware were made. This gives us the opportunity to build software in a different way, one that’s not open to abuse and does not require users to fully trust the service-providers. Also, just using simple and minimal provider infrastructure for public content or using self-hosted infrastructure with open software is getting more and more viable.
We’re just getting started, please check back soon for more!
