Free resources · Glossary
Plain words for data, privacy, and who owns what
A lot of the language around technology is built to sound complicated, because complicated is easier to sell to and harder to leave. We do not think it has to be that way. Knowledge like this should be shared, so here are the terms we use when we talk about why we work the way we do, in plain language and with no jargon tax.
Read it straight through or jump to a word. When you are ready to put any of it into practice, you have three ways to work with us: use the free resources on your own, learn it alongside us so your team can run it (done with you), or hand the whole thing off and we will take care of it (done for you).
How “free” really works
The words for the business model behind most of the tools you did not pay for.
If the product is free, you are the product
An old saying that still explains most of the internet. When a service costs you nothing, the money has to come from somewhere, and usually it comes from selling access to your attention and your data. You are not the customer in that arrangement. You are the thing being sold to the people who are.
Extractive company
A business whose real product is what it can pull out of you. It might be your data, your attention, or your inability to leave. The tool in front of you is just the bait. You can usually spot one by asking a simple question: does this company make more money the more it learns about me, or the harder it is for me to quit?
Surveillance capitalism
The name for an economy built on watching people. Companies record what you do, predict what you will do next, and sell those predictions. The watching is not a side effect of the product. It is the product, and your everyday behavior is the raw material.
Telemetry
The quiet stream of data a device or app sends back to its maker about how you use it. Some of it is genuinely there to fix bugs. A lot of it is there to build a profile of you. The honest version is clearly labeled and easy to turn off, which is a good test of who you are dealing with.
In practice: It is why we measure visits with privacy-first tools like Umami or Plausible instead of Google Analytics. They count what we need to count and nothing more, rather than feeding a far larger profile of everyone who stops by.
Dark patterns
Design choices made to trick you instead of help you. The cancel button hidden three menus deep, the box that is pre-checked to share your data, the free trial that is hard to escape. If a screen seems designed to make the easy thing the thing you did not want, you are looking at a dark pattern.
Owning what is yours
The words for keeping control of your data, your tools, and your freedom to walk away.
Data ownership
Holding your own information in a form you control, rather than renting access to it from a company that holds it for you. Real ownership means you can see all of it, copy all of it, and take all of it somewhere else without asking permission. If you cannot get it out, you do not really own it.
Data portability
How cleanly you can pick up your data and move it to another service. Good portability means a complete export in a format other tools can actually read. Bad portability means a useless dump, or a chat with support, or no way out at all. It is the difference between a door and a wall.
Digital sovereignty
Being genuinely in charge of your own technology. It means you decide where your data lives, who can touch it, and which laws apply to it, instead of those things being decided for you by a vendor in another country. For a small organization it is less about politics and more about not being at someone else’s mercy.
Governance
Who actually steers a project: who decides what gets built, what gets dropped, and whether it stays open. A tool can be open source today and still be quietly captured tomorrow if a single company controls its direction. The healthiest projects are governed by a community or a non-profit, so no one owner can close the door behind you.
In practice: It is why we chose MariaDB over MySQL for our databases. MySQL is owned by Oracle, which steers it behind closed doors; MariaDB was forked by MySQL’s own original creator to keep it free and community-governed. The same thinking points us to Forgejo over GitHub for hosting code, a forge looked after by a non-profit rather than owned by Microsoft.
Vendor lock-in
When a company makes signing up easy and leaving expensive. Your content, your domain, or your customer list ends up trapped inside their system, so the cost of switching keeps you paying long after you wanted to go. The fix is to own the pieces that matter, so you could move tomorrow and take everything with you.
In practice: It is why we build on WordPress and keep your domain registered in your name. Your whole site exports in a standard format, so you could change hosts tomorrow, rather than living inside a closed builder like Wix or Squarespace where your content stays trapped.
Interoperability
Whether your tools can talk to other tools instead of only to themselves. When things interoperate, you can mix the best pieces and swap any one of them out later. When they do not, you are stuck buying everything from one company, which is usually the point.
Exit cost
What it would actually take to leave a service: the hours, the money, and the headache of getting your data and your people moved. A healthy tool keeps that cost low on purpose, because it expects to earn your stay. Before you commit to anything new, it is worth knowing the exit cost up front. We wrote a guide to reading a hosting contract for exactly this reason.
Keeping it private
The words for protecting what you keep, and for knowing who can see it.
Privacy
Deciding for yourself who gets to see what. Privacy is not the same as secrecy and it is not about having something to hide. It is the everyday right to close a door, to keep a client list to yourself, to have a conversation that is not quietly recorded and sold. You set the terms, not the company.
Encryption
Scrambling information so only the people who are supposed to read it can. The strongest kind, often called end-to-end or zero-access encryption, locks your data so that even the company hosting it cannot read it. That is the line worth looking for, because it turns “please trust us” into “we could not peek even if we wanted to.”
Metadata
The data about your data. Not the words in your email, but who you wrote to, when, and how often. Metadata feels harmless because it is not the contents, yet a pattern of it can reveal more about your life than the messages themselves. Companies collect it eagerly for exactly that reason.
Open source
Software whose inner workings are published for anyone to inspect. Because the code is out in the open, independent people can check that it does what it claims and nothing it does not. It is the opposite of a black box, and it is a big part of why open tools are easier to trust and far harder to quietly turn against you.
In practice: It is why we favor open tools like Signal for messaging and LibreOffice for documents over closed equivalents. Anyone can inspect them, so their trustworthiness is something you can check rather than something you are asked to take on faith.
Self-hosting
Running a tool on a server you control instead of one a company controls for you. It puts your data on your own ground, with no third party reading over your shoulder and no surprise policy change to work around. It takes a bit more setup, which is often the part we handle so you get the control without the chores.
In practice: It is why we reach for tools like Nextcloud for files and calendars instead of Google Workspace. Your documents sit on a server you control, with nothing scanning them in the background and no policy change to brace for.
Now that we are speaking the same language
If any of these words describe a problem you are living with, that is exactly the kind of thing we fix. Use the free resources on your own, bring us in to train your team and do it with you, or hand it off and let us do it for you. Same destination, you pick the pace.
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