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Baldur Bjarnason

Idle thought of the day: if you assume that environmental crises, political instability, and authoritarian states are going to become more common over the next couple of decades, how would that change the way you design your websites and apps?

4 comments
Baldur Bjarnason

How would you design your app if you are worried that an authoritarian state might seize all of your user's data and work?

How would you design your website if you think the countries where your hosting datacentres are located might descend into civil war? Or get invaded?

Most of us who are working on web apps and websites today are doing so in an unstable world. The UK and US are fast becoming more authoritarian so it might not be a hypothetical question for much longer.

Erich Apfel

@baldur Ah, now I understand your question. I guess the idealistic responses would be encryption, anonymisation, decentralization, redundancy. But who will pay you for developing an app in such a world? Except for those we want protection from?

Baldur Bjarnason

@turion Therein lies the rub, so to speak. Few are going to pay for a solution to a problem they don't necessarily believe they are going to have in the future.

brennen

@baldur

> How would you design your app if you are worried that an authoritarian state might seize all of your user's data and work?

at some level, the only way to protect these things is not to store them in the first place. "store nothing" is of course unrealistic for many practitioners (though it certainly guides my sense of whether i actually want to work on software)...

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