Sadly, Hallmark has yet to make Data Privacy Day cards, so you're forgiven if you didn't know it's being celebrated today.
Then again, i had no idea either.
Still, anyone who knows me knows that i pretty much live every day like it's Data Privacy Day. i know that if you don't own your data, you have no control over it. This is why data i share to things like Twitter, Flickr, Facebook or any other of the myriad of clouds big and small, is not important stuff. It's copies of things, for the most part and when those services go away, i'm not particularly bothered.
For what it's worth, allow me to contribute to the Data Privacy bits by noting a few things you can use right now to help with said data privacy, but still give you control over your data.
Step 1: Get a domain. (preferably one that allows shell access, WebDAV, PHP and MySQL). i'm a fan of Dreamhost for crap like this, but feel free to use any other. Why the need for shell access? Because it's far easier to do snapshots using programs like rsync than it is to do FTP fetches.
Want a network accessible Calendar? i use PHPiCalendar and store the ICS files behind a WebDAV share. Honestly, you can skip PHPiCalendar and just store and update the files using SunBird and/or Lightning, but having a web view of the calendar can be handy when you want to bring it up on your pocket mobile device.
Speaking of Firefox as your browser of choice, i already mentioned that Weave is a fantastic plug in for syncing your bookmarks, passwords, browsing history, and pretty much everything else, right? Did you know that you can have it write out to a WebDAV service hosted on your own server? (Go to the "Advanced" tab in the Weave configuration screen to set the server location to your WebDAV partition of choice. Use the WebDAV username and password you've set up, and yes, Weave encrypts what is stored so that idle eyes won't be able to decipher it.)
Want somewhere to store interesting bookmarks? Scuttle. You can also provide feeds of tag categories allowing for a nice "Tumblr" kind of experience should anyone want that, although if you're going that route, i'd probably recommend mindof.
Honestly, for a lot of other things, (images, "tweets", microblogs, and what-not) i'm always a bit surprised that folks don't use existing blogs and just do a better job with the categories. Damn near every single hosting service provides a one click install of blog software, so it's not like it's particularly hard to set up.
Ah well, here's to keeping your data safe. Me? i plan on celebrating the day by bashing open a piñata and being pleasantly surprised that it's empty.
