At Akademy 2016, the KDE community started a long-term project to invigorate its development (both, technically and organizationally) with more focus. This process of soul-searching has already yielded some very useful results, the most important one so far being agreement of a common community-wide vision:

A world in which everyone has control over their digital life and enjoys freedom and privacy.

This presents a very high-level vision, so a logical follow-up question has been how this influences KDE’s activities and actions in practice. KDE, being a fairly loose community with many separate sub-communities and products, is not an easy target to align to a common goal. A common goal may have very different on each of KDE’s products, for an email and groupware client, that may be very straight-forward (e.g. support high-end crypto, work very well with privacy-respecting and/or self-hosted services), for others, it may be mostly irrelevant (a natural painting app such as Krita simply doesn’t have a lot of privacy exposure), yet for a product such as Plasma, the implications may be fundamental and varied.

So in the pursuit of the common ground and a common goal, we had to concentrate on what unites us. There’s of course Software Freedom, but that is somewhat vague as well, and also it’s already entrenched in KDE’s DNA. It’s not a very useful goal since it doesn’t give us something to strive for, but something we maintain anyway. A “good goal” has to be more specific, yet it should have a clear connection to Free Software, since that is probably the single most important thing that unites us. Almost two years ago, I posed that privacy is Free Software’s new milestone, trying to set a new goal post for us to head for. Now the point where these streams join has come, and KDE has chosen privacy as one of its primary goals for the next 3 to 4 years. The full proposal can be read here.

“In 5 years, KDE software enables and promotes privacy”

Privacy, being a vague concept, especially given the diversity in the KDE community needs some explanation, some operationalization to make it specific and to know how we can create software that enables privacy. There are three general focus areas we will concentrate on: Security, privacy-respecting defaults and offering the right tools in the first place.

Security

Improving security means improving our processes to make it easier to spot and fix security problems and avoiding single points of failure in both software and development processes. This entails code review, quick turnaround times for security fixes.

Privacy-respecting defaults

Defaulting to encrypted connections where possible and storing sensible data in a secure way. The user should be able to expect the KDE software Does The Right Thing and protect his or her data in the best possible way. Surprises should be avoided as much as possible, and reasonable expectations should be met with best effort.

Offering the right tools

KDE prides itself for providing a very wide range of useful software. From a privacy point of view, some functions are more important than others, of course. We want to offer the tools that most users need in a way that allows them to lead their life privately, so the toolset needs to be comprehensive and cover as many needs as possible. The tools itself should make it easy and straight-forward to achieve privacy. Some examples:

An email client allowing encrypted communication

Chat and instant messenging with state-of-the art protocol security

Support for online services that can be operated as private instance, not depending on a 3rd party provider

…

Of course, this is only a small part, and the needs of our userbase varies wildly.

Onwards from here…

In the past, KDE software has come a long way in providing privacy tools, but the tool-set is neither comprehensive, nor is privacy its implications widely seen as critical to our success in this area. Setting privacy as a central goal for KDE means that we will put more focus on this topic and lead to improved tools that allow users to increase their level of privacy. Moreover, it will set an example for others to follow and hopefully increase standards across the whole software ecosystem. There is much work to do, and we’re excited to put our shoulder under it and work on it.