With our Kickstarter around the corner - launching on the 2nd of January 2020 - we thought this might be a good time to communicate what our next steps are going to be. These are no far fetched, crazy dreams, but instead executable plans. In 2020, we will surely finish several of these steps. And if the campaign goes well enough, we could gain sufficient resources to hire additional talent, helping us complete them all!
First and foremost, our first step is going to be launching the SPN in June. It is a feature packed privacy network which protects your web connections from meta-data extraction as they travel through the Internet. With the SPN your ISP and the Wi-Fi operator of your local coffee shop cannot collect and sell your browsing habits. It protects the connections of your whole computer, not only you those of the browser. It also enforces DNS over TLS. We’re looking forward to completing this first step, but it’s just the beginning.
For more information, you can read more about our tech or the SPN whitepaper.
As we will start out with hosting all of the servers of this multi-hop network ourselves, this means your meta-data is spread across all of our servers. Even though we open sourced our code and made it very difficult, it is in theory still possible for us to extract your browsing habits. As this is not good enough for us, our primary focus will be adding community nodes to the system. Volunteers will be welcomed to join our cause, creating a decentralized network without a single point of trust. And the best thing about it, we will as a second step split our revenue with contributing community nodes, further encouraging this decentralized network.
Disclaimer: we would love to launch the community nodes and immediately pay them, but this requires additional development and would slow us down in becoming a trust-less system, which is why we decided to take one step first - then the other
We will initially be launching the SPN on Windows. Although there will be a Linux version as well, we will wait for the full support until a few months after the launch. This means we can bundle all our resources on polishing Windows. People will still be able to experiment with the Linux version, but non-crucial bug fixes and quality of life improvements will have to wait until the full support. This step will probably be achieved around the time as we also introduce the community nodes - so the wait will not be too long.
The first three steps are our main focus, but as soon as we complete them, we will fully dive into also supporting Mac OS - achieving full desktop support. This moment will be super exciting! I cannot wait for the day where every desktop user can come to our homepage and download the Safing app. We really do not want to exclude any users because of limited support.
After achieving overall desktop support we will help your computer in becoming a privacy stealth machine. It is a great step to protect your meta-data on its way through the web, but what about all those nasty connections that should never have left your computer in the first place? Connections that are only here to track your behavior. Analytics trackers have infiltrated almost all software we currently use. It is the norm not asking you about it and simply uploading your every mouse move, or even your content to another persons computer - oh wait, right: “the cloud”.
As we already intercept your connections, why not enable you to block the faulty ones as well? We will do just that. Open source, naturally.
And the best it will be totally free to use. We totally get that not everyone will be able to pay for the SPN and its servers - but why not enable them to get stealthy privacy too? There is no reason not to!
That will complete the first stage of our plans. At this point we can finally give away an open source, powerful application firewall. Free for anyone to use, supporting all desktop operating systems. And those who like what we do and can afford it, can then pay for the SPN to support us. We truly cannot wait!
But of course, the mission will continue. We will want to support mobile too, and what about those people who do not know which connections the application firewall should block or not? We plan to ask a crowd of experts to decide for the everyday user. But this is all for the future.
Also, next week, me and Daniel will dive into all our future plans. Where do we see us in 5 years? Now that will be the day where we dream! ;)
December 6, 2019 • Written by David