Twitter has erupted recently in light of the recent Evernote incident, where the private company in question updated their privacy policy to allow employees to read user notes. Hundreds and thousands of users are packing their bags and departing to somewhere more tropical, leaving a small note on the fridge:

“GONE 2 ONENOTE.”

Another says:

“NEW MAC NOTES APP, HEADING TO SEE WHAT THAT’S ABOUT”

These brave nomads are venturing to the promised land, defined apparently as anywhere but here. But this all too common pattern of leaving one private company for another anytime one slips up must end.

When will we finally learn that no private company has our best interests at heart? When will we learn that only we can protect the things we care about?

Do you trust Microsoft more than Evernote with your data? A new small startup that releases a promising notes app with amazing “natural language to Markdown capabilities”? The reality is, you will outlive most startups, and the ones you live to see grow only become more vile by volume.

How much longer will we continue to give private corporations the benefit of the doubt with our privacy and data?

It’s time for real change.

There’s a rising tide of privacy and security enthusiasts, even amongst generalists like myself. Even normal, non-technical people are starting to get excited about new technologies that place privacy and ownership top of mind. Technologies and topics like Bitcoin, end-to-end encryption, and open source software are spreading to more mainstream corners every day.

If there’s one thing we can count on, it’s that what early adopters are fiddling with today will be mainstream tomorrow. The last time nerds fiddled with electronic message systems and ARPANET, the world got email and the internet. Toddlers today grow up in a world where they think mobile phones and wireless transmission of data come standard. They don’t give it a second thought.

What are nerds fiddling with today?

If you’re launching a new startup or creating a new product, and data privacy and encryption is not chief amongst your concerns, then there will be no change to this world, and private corporations will continue to run unbounded by their fetishes to grow at all costs.

User data must be treated as a liability, and not an asset. Whatever part of a user’s data that is not used in the day-to-day operation of serving that user should be encrypted by the user on the client side. Whatever data the company needs to understand in order to function properly and serve that user can bypass local, client-side encryption, but must be stored encrypted server-side. This is the minimum we must aspire to.

If you’re a product consumer, begin demanding end-to-end encryption where reasonable and server side encryption otherwise. Slack is a great place to start. The company refuses to adopt end-to-end encryption because that would make searching difficult. But that tradeoff should be the end user’s to decide, not the company’s.

With technologies like WebCrypto gaining momentum, clients today are a lot more powerful than they were ten years ago. And while it might have made sense to let the server do all the heavy lifting of data processing back then, the world today is different.

Let us reconsider how we handle the data of other human beings. Let’s treat this data with the same level of respect we’d treat our neighbors. The reasons for this are plentiful, but one sticks out most:

While two people can debate endlessly about whether government today is well or ill-intentioned, we cannot be so certain what government will look like tomorrow. Government in this context is defined as a group of decision makers who can ultimately enforce their will by the use of a police force that can harm you or put you in a cage. While government today may seem passive in their attempts to harm normal citizens by using their data against them, this may not be the case in the future.

This, however, is hardly a case of “better safe than sorry.” This is, what has been the pattern of government behavior lately?

These violent delights have violent ends.

Combine that with nature’s own fetish for violence and destruction as an agent of change, and you can quickly derive that a culmination point is inevitable, when our reality will be modified and mutated beyond recognition.

An oracle warns, sickly and incessantly, perhaps machine-like: these violent delights have violent ends.

Have we seen it end any other way?