FreedomBox Foundation

The Freedom Box Foundation is has developed a "freedombox", as of October 2015, which allows you to:

• communicate with others privately
• be able to browse the web without being monitored
• use decentralized methods of communication successfully and with ease

The aim of this foundation, if you read their flyer above, is to disrupt monitoring efforts of corporations and the government. This relates to Christian Fuchs, Culture and Economy in the Age of Social Media “Social Media and the Public Sphere” (Pages 315-371), where Fuchs discusses Privacy and monitoring within the public sphere. He discusses Habermas' idea that media is an entity which enables social relations. Lunt and Livington's critique of Habermas addresses that within the public sphere, access or ability to contribute may be limited due to access of media technology or oppression. This freedom box, although it must be purchased, claims that if it is successful it can allow communication in natural disaster or in places which have limited communication. This would support or answer Lunt and Livington's question of access within the public sphere, and allow people globally to participate. Corporate companies who use our data for capital gain is a common fear and theme talked about within our course, and by avid media consumers. This monitoring and data mining can violate our consumer privacy and is very controversial as companies can access our data yet we cannot see theirs. Unfortunately, we as consumers are in a problematic place because in order to avoid this we must turn away from all centralized forms of communication e.g. Gmail, Facebook, Twitter, that keep us participating in online culture and socialized with others. In the video below, the Freedombox representative, explains how this technology will allow use to not support data mining by using alternative methods of communication.


Although this technology solves the problem we find to be data mining what do you think are some problems that could arise with the evasion of centralized socialization methods? Will it only be problematic for corporate companies, or will it directly affect us as consumers in a negative way?

Go to www.Freedombox.org for more information!