(Read this article in Spanish)
We describe IUVIA, a privacy-by-design device and operating system to claim back data sovereignty and agency scaling from individuals to organizations.
Coronavirus: probably, one of the most repeated words lately in the news and even in informal conversations. Tiny SARS-CoV-2 is deadly and global, keeping us awake, worried about friends or family that we may have distant; it's keeping politicians thinking, companies tanking stock, investors losing their minds, patience and trust in the market, employees losing their jobs and most of us confined in our homes.
A different story can be told about our data. When we are at home and enduring social distancing, we make use of the Internet (which can now be clearly seen as an essential service in the first world, on par with healthcare and food) in order to speak to our dear ones. Many "remote-distrusting" companies are now forcefully choosing to make their workforce remote-capable as a last resort before massive lay-offs and even bankruptcy. And it seems to be working for some of them.
This means that many companies who were not prepared have just been forced into the cloud, even those that might have strong concerns about it, in order to survive.
Thus, strongly confidential data is now, unfortunately, much nearer crackers and black marketers. The rush to "remotify" a workforce has meant that unsecured laptops and devices are now accessing protected data without proper safety measures standard for IT remote workforce.
IUVIA came up originally from our own desires to break free from corporate clouds. It has been a long road to establish all the connections and weak spots of open source solutions, and our intention has always been to bridge the gap to provide a cohesive platform about this. Although we had been collaborating and working on the issue on our own, NGI LEDGER was the final piece that allowed us to pool enough resources together to prioritize our work on an idea that we begun to stage years ago within GPUL, a non-profit for free software advocacy and Local Linux User Group in A Coruña, in the northwest of Spain. During this pandemic, we have not needed to rely on anything other than free software services that we could provide as part of IUVIA, and a neutral Internet to connect to them.