Zaclys is one of many "Chatons"
Collective of Alternative, Transparent, Open, Neutral and Solidarity Hosts.
"CHATONS is a collective initiated by the association Framasoft following the success of its "De-Ice Internet" campaign.
The project aims to bring together players offering free, ethical, decentralized and supportive online services to enable users to quickly find alternatives to Google's products (among others) but respectful of their data and privacy."
What is CHATONS?
CHATONS is the Collective of Alternative, Transparent, Open, Neutral and Solidarity Hosts. It aims to bring together structures that want to avoid the collection and centralization of personal data within digital silos of the type of GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft).
CHATONS is a collective initiated by the association Framasoft following the success of its "De-Ice Internet" campaign.
The project aims to bring together players offering free, ethical, decentralized and supportive online services to enable users to quickly find alternatives to Google's products (among others) but respectful of their data and privacy.
I didn't understand…
CHATONS is a collective of small structures offering online services (e.g. email, web hosting, collaborative tools, communication tools, etc.).
The peculiarity of CHATONS is that the members of this collective are particularly committed to:
- Use only free software
- not to exploit the data of the beneficiaries of their services (not to transmit or exploit your data);
- Not to use advertising boards (or other tracking services)
- to regularly propose "physical" meetings with their beneficiary, in order to reduce the digital divide, which is not only an economic divide, but also a knowledge divide.
I still don't get it…
Do you know the principle of AMAP? These associations that offer city dwellers baskets of vegetables (or other foodstuffs) from local (and often organic) agricultural production?
Well you can see CHATONS as "an AMAP network of online service." Where Google, Facebook or Microsoft would represent the food industry, CHATONS members would be "computer farmers" offering "organic" online services:
- GMO-free (without proprietary software that does not guarantee your freedoms),
- pesticide-free (without basing their income on the sale of your personal data),
- without aggressive marketing (without an advertising agency tracking your behaviour),
- without a "race for purchasing power", which in reality harms small farmers (equal prices between kittens and their beneficiaries)
CHATONS is therefore both an organization of members who share the same values, and a form of "label".
Why this collective?
The objectives are multiple:
- offer beneficiaries a free service that respects their private/professional lives
- give visibility to hosts who share common values
- share information among members
More generally, it is a question of resisting the "googlization" of the Internet. The gigantic data silos managed by Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon or Microsoft not only harm privacy (by making mass surveillance possible, and making the flaws of their systems catastrophic for millions, even billions of users), but pose a more global, political and citizen problem: what powers do we entrust to the hands of a few companies?
Many independent hosts promoting a vision of the free have existed for years:
- https://www.lautre.net/
- https://www.web4all.fr/
- http://www.marsnet.org
- https://ouvaton.coop/
- https://www.infini.fr/
- http://www.toile-libre.org/
(obviously not exhaustive list…)
Some had even regrouped (e.g. http://rhien.org).
However, most did not offer online applications and focused on more technical services (web/FTP, email, etc.), leaving the field open to GAFAM to attract users to their services mass collecting personal data.
More recently, free app hosts have appeared, such as https://zaclys.com or https://framasoft.org
The chatonS collective therefore aims to propose a structuring of these players (old as well as new).