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There's a saying that's gained some popularity in online circles lately, "if you're not paying for something, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold."
When it comes to free online services like GMail, Flickr or Bing this is literally true. You, or at least your eyeballs and attention, are the product being sold to advertisers. The email service, photo hosting or search tools are just the hook that gets the real bait on the line so to speak.
There's another implicit idea lurking inside the "you're the product" statement -- that when you do pay for services those services are somehow more beholden to you, which just might be the biggest lie on the web.
Sometimes it may feel that way, but ultimately publicly traded companies like Google, Apple or Microsoft are actually beholden only to their stockholders whose interests may or may not be aligned with your own. Smaller startups are sometimes more reliable, but usually they're even less so, especially with nearly every startup these days angling for a big payday that almost always results in shutting down the service.
In other words, it's true that free services are the least trustworthy and most likely to disappear without so much as an export button offered, but just because you're paying for something doesn't mean it's going to hang around, nor does it mean your data is any more private, secure or ultimately even yours.
In some instances paid services may last longer than free alternatives but there's certainly no guarantee. If you want a guarantee you're going to have to run your own server, your own Flickr, your own Dropbox.
Sometimes the discussion about putting data in the cloud can seem academic. No one is spying on my stuff, none of the services I use are shutting down, why should I worry?
But, no matter how blase you may be about putting your data in the cloud, as with hard drive failures, eventually you'll lose something critical -- the spreadsheet with years' worth of bookkeeping, analytics data that could mean doubling your revenue or perhaps just irreplaceable photos of your kids.
The impending closure of Google Reader offers a good lesson in the dangers of investing too heavily in services you don't control. I always knew I was too heavily invested in Google Reader, which was the cornerstone of how I did research and stayed up with tech news for a very long time, but I didn't really know just how badly I was exposed to Google's whims until the company decided to shut down it down. No more Reader doesn't just put a crimp in my workflow, it essentially eliminates my workflow.
I'm not the only one recently forced to confront the dangers of relying on the services of outside companies. In just a few days Google Reader will scrape its last RSS feed and millions of reasonably savvy web users will lose years' worth of data (you can export your feeds, but not much else). The question is, do we learn from this or do we just move to the next service?
Sometimes it makes sense to go with a service. Facebook is Facebook, trying to run your own Facebook isn't just silly it's impossible. The value of Facebook is the network, not the service it provides. But for mission critical tools like email, file sharing/syncing or, in my case, an RSS reader, relying on anything not in my control doesn't make sense.
Not that I didn't start with the idea of moving to another service. In fact, I evaluated dozens of options, but while Feedly is interesting and Feedbin works with numerous third-party apps, I couldn't escape the nagging feeling that I was just setting myself up for another failure down the road.
In the end I decided to bite the bullet and set up a self-hosted RSS reader on my own server because I wanted to be in control. More than I wanted the convenience of a hosted service like Feedly, more than I wanted a seamless transition from Google Reader, I wanted control.
At the end of the day the only way to ensure that your data is yours, remains free for whomever you'd like to have access to it and isn't sold off to the highest bidder is to own your own tools.
It used to be that running your own file sharing server, self-hosting an address book, email server or photo sharing application was a Herculean task. In fact, many a bookmarking service, email provider and photo sharing web site started life just because one person figured out how to do it and then their friends wanted in, and then friends of friends. Next thing you know you're running del.icio.us.
Fortunately these days it's not that hard to get a private server up and running with the latest version of Ubuntu installed and every bit of software you might need only an apt-get away. If even that sounds like too much to worry about there are hosted solutions that will spin you up a server instance with hosting software like ownCloud pre-installed and configured for easy, private services that are (largely) under your control.
Obviously the simpler you want the setup to be the more you're beholden to your hosting company. For example most of the ownCloud providers I've tested don't allow you to customize much, nor do they always offer speedy updates (though this is usually for stability reasons so it's often a good thing) or if they do offer customizations it's considerably more expensive.
Everything on the internet is a series of trade-offs, so the more you're willing to do yourself, the more you're willing to assume responsibility for, the more you'll be able to ensure your data is under your control. The good news for individuals is that you're not alone, there's a whole fellowship of like-minded, self-hosting people on the web offering tutorials, hacks and even GitHub repos full of software. Thanks to some recent efforts from larger businesses and organizations like NASA, many of which are just starting to realize the dangers of being dependent on third-parties for key infrastructure components like email or file sharing, there's a lot of fantastic software out there.
For my RSS needs I ended up testing out both Fever (which I've used off and on for years) and TinyTinyRSS, which ended up being my day-to-day favorite. I use Fever as well to monitor infrequently checked feeds and to discover trends and overarching themes in my feeds. Setting both up is dead simple, I've got mine running on a simple $5-a-month shared host. Any shared host that offers PHP and MYSQL/PostGRES will do. So you are paying for something, which should make those who like to pay for things feel better (Fever is also not free, though it's just a one-time license fee).
Setting up either one is no more difficult than setting up WordPress on your own server. You'll just need to upload the files, add your database info to the configuration file and click through a series of installation pages. As with WordPress when you're done you have the same great features you'll find in hosted solutions, but you'll be in control.
The payoff for that extra bit of effort is huge compared to the actual effort. What you end up with is control and in the increasingly cloud-based future of the web the next popular saying won't be about you being a product or not it'll be about you being in control or not: "If you aren't hosting your data, it's not your data".
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