Over the past few days, there has been public outrage over the way Facebook is handling personal data. This was brought to light by the recent scandal with Cambridge Analytica, but really should come as no surprise, as Facebook has been treating its users this way since it launched back in 2004.

Minds takes a much different approach. Since our launch, everything we have built has been with you, the community, at the forefront. Our goal is to create a social network that puts control back into your hands.

What Happened With Cambridge Analytica

The story that broke over the past few days is really just a piece of a much larger issue with Facebook and how they handle personal data. To summarize, a developer named Aleksandr Kogan developed an application in 2014 offering a personality quiz to Facebook users. About 270,000 users took the quiz, but in doing so they granted Kogan’s app access to not only their Facebook data, but the data of ALL of their Facebook friends as well — meaning the app now had data on 50 million users. Kogan then provided this data to Cambridge Analytica, who used it to create over 30 million psychographic profiles about potential voters.

Why Facebook is at Fault

1) Data Policy

Up until 2014, Facebook’s policy allowed for any application developer to ask permission from Facebook users to access their data. However, it also allowed the apps to collect that same data about ALL of that user’s friends on Facebook, without consent. Facebook changed this policy in 2014 to ensure that apps could not collect data on user’s friends, but at that point, the damage had been done.

In Zuckerberg’s recent statement addressing the situation, he claimed,

We will investigate all apps that had access to large information before we changed our platform to dramatically reduce data access in 2014, and we will conduct a full audit of any app with suspicious activity.

This is the right step to take, and one they have to take, but this is also something they knowingly avoided for years. In a New York Times op-edfrom last November, an ex-Facebook employee from their privacy team stated,

At a company that was deeply concerned about protecting its users, this situation would have been met with a robust effort to cut off developers who were making questionable use of data. But when I was at Facebook, the typical reaction I recall looked like this: try to put any negative press coverage to bed as quickly as possible, with no sincere efforts to put safeguards in place or to identify and stop abusive developers. When I proposed a deeper audit of developers’ use of Facebook’s data, one executive asked me, “Do you really want to see what you’ll find?”

Zuckerberg also stated that they will be implementing a new tool at the top of the newsfeed that allows users to revoke the permissions that users have provided to apps in the past. While this will help users know who has their data, it is still just another proprietary software tool to further deceive the community into thinking they have any sort of privacy. It is damage control, and not a long-term solution by any means. It doesn’t account for any data privacy in connection with government surveillance or surveillance of users/employees by Facebook themselves, which is also a critical piece of the puzzle.

2) Data Collection

The crux of the issue lies in the data that Facebook requires from new users in the first place. You are forced to provide your first name, last name, email or phone number, birthday and gender. The reason is simple – this information is a marketer’s targeting dream, or Stalin’s dream, as free software movement founder Richard Stallman puts it, and also the key to Facebook’s revenue and entire business model. Zuckerberg clearly realizes this is one of the main areas of concern, as he just stated recently that they are going to reduce the information required upon signup to just name, profile photo and email address. A step in the right direction assuredly, but still not any type of real solution. They still control and require the data.

It is hard to blame Facebook for this alone because when you sign up, you are agreeing to provide them with this personal information, so there is the level of consent. However, Facebook deceives their users into thinking their information is “private” by providing layers of permissions and privacy settings. If users were more aware about how much of their personal data was actually public (or being shared with intelligence agencies), they would be much more reserved in giving it away. Personal data is not private unless you yourself have control.

Facebook has the control, not you, and Zuckerberg has known this since the beginning. Obviously he has attempted to apologize for the below comments, but he has demonstrated no tangible actions to actually address the public concern and provide a real solution.

How Minds is Different

Minds and Facebook are fundamentally different with regards to user privacy.

1) Minds allows users to be 100% anonymous, untracked and free from spying

Users are encouraged to maintain anonymity, and we do not collect information that could be harvested for psychographic purposes. Emails are not even required, so any content or activity on the site cannot be traced to an identifiable person unless they have chosen to provide that personal data themselves. This is a crucial factor because it gives users control of what personal data they wish to provide, rather than the other way around.

2) We maintain zero-knowledge of the content of user conversations in encrypted messenger

This is essential in ensuring that users can chat freely with each other without the concern that the conversation is being monitored. The zero knowledge proof also holds true for users who choose to remain anonymous, as we do not have any personal data linked to their account. Any other sensitive data is encrypted and original content is owned by the user.

3) Our software is 100% free and open source for public accountability and inspection

Unlike top proprietary social networks, you can actually look at our entire code base at either https://minds.org or https://github.com/minds. You are encouraged to inspect our code and even help contribute and build the network. This provides much needed community ownership and transparency into what our platform is actually doing, as opposed to simply taking our word for it.

This debate exposes the paradox between transparency and privacy, both of which are core principles of Minds, like Wikipedia and other Internet freedom pioneers. For example, we have a clear distinction between private information (encrypted messages, emails) and public information (your posts, etc). You own your content, and simultaneously, the actions on the site like votes and shares, are public knowledge. Facebook has gotten themselves into a deadly trap by pretending they are giving people privacy with layered permissions levels and supposed ‘privacy’ settings while also exposing massive amounts of data without consent. They require personal data and are handing it over to the highest bidders. The user has lost control.

Minds gives that control back to the people. We look forward to hearing your thoughts and ideas.

Let me start this off by just saying, this is not for the faint of heart, or the non developer. (I am going to assume you know basics, as in, you can use git, and that git is installed, as well as basic linux comands)

Getting this up and going 100% can NOT be done without knowledge of PHP, the stripe API, and some time.

However, with that said if you do not care about the monetization, or notifications then you will have no issues if you follow this guide.(hopefully :P)

You will need to install 3 things, vagrant, virtualbox, and git

Just say yes to everything and then ignore them both… 🙂

As for Git, its helpful to install the context menu options because then you can right click in any directory and choose git bash here and just start running commands 🙂

Now you need the code so run these commands.

git clone https://github.com/Minds/minds.git Minds

cd Minds

if there is a front and/or engine folder in the Minds folder, delete them. there links to the incorrect repos and they will just cause issues so remove them. then clone the correct front and engine repos from within the Minds folder.

git clone https://github.com/Minds/front.git front

git clone https://github.com/Minds/engine.git engine

Great now we have all the needed code. and this is where the guild splits, i am going to try and make this as simple as possible.

so from within the root Minds ( you should already be there.) do the following.

vagrant up

now wait, this will take a while but it is setting up and installing EVERYTHING you need to run minds (wellllll not everything :))

once that is finished it will say done and that you can visit dev.minds.io in a browser, well its lying 🙂 first you must navigate to

C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc

in that folder you will see a few files, the only one that matters is the file called hosts

So since windows is a PITA, you will need to copy this file to your desktop( just right click hold and drag to the desktop) if it asks for admin approval click yes, now edit the hosts file you dragged to the desktop, and add at this at the VERY bottom of the file.

10.54.0.111    dev.minds.io

Save the file close it, and now drag it back to where you got it from and overwrite the old one.(now for that to actually take effect you will need to either logoff or reboot, wait till later for this it can be the very last thing you do.)

Now if you try to go to dev.minds.io in your browser you will either get a 500 error (if you have not rebooted) or you will get a 404 error i believe from nginx, this is expected b/c vagrant didnt actually do everything. the front end was never compiled. So lets do that, but wait, how do you do that….

let me explain something incase you are not 100% sure what vagrant does. so all the vagrant up command did was start up virtual box, and create a virtual machine, it just did it all from a single file called a vagrantfile (its in the root Minds folder) so basically you are running a virtual machine in the background right now.

well remmeber vagrant did all that stuff, and then it said done. well in that same terminal window type in vagrant ssh to connect to the vagrant VM, now since this is linux things have just changed, ignore and forget what ever directory you put minds in on windows cause linux doesnt care and vagrant mapped that location to /var/www/Minds in linux.

So we need to build the front end, right, well go to Minds/front

cd /var/www/Minds/front

Now remember that i said vagrant did not install everything. well this is when you need to correct that so here are a few commands you need to run.

this is also the moment where you need to be the root user and you will still need to use sudo(dont ask i dont fully get why either but its the only way i got it to work without screwing up, and there is still about a 10% chance it will break)

sudo npm install -g gulp;sudo npm install -g typings;sudo npm install -g typescript

Once those are installed and you back at your prompt you can really begin to install and build the front end like so.

sudo npm install

this command will most likely fail, with an error having to do with node-sass, the fix is to do the following

cd ../

sudo chown -R root:root .

cd front/node_modules/node-sass/

sudo npm run build

cd /var/www/Minds

sudo chown -R root:root .

the reason we are changing ownership, is when some things were build / installed they were not owned by root so we needed to fix that.

once that is finished go back to the front folder and run this again

sudo npm install

now it should not give you an error and you can

sudo npm run build

Now you are going to see a few errors, ignore them, it has to do with the SCSS files and there nothing that will break the build. if you not see a wall of giberish at any time, then you are good and now you can go back to the browser(if you have restarted if not, do so now) and reload dev.minds.io.

And with that YOU ARE DONE!!!

if you have issues let me know i have probably ran into them all so yea lol.

after writing this i went back through and followed my own instructions, updated a few things and well not it will not build 🙁 so ill figure this out and update this again.

ok so the error im getting is this

/bin/bash: node_modules/.bin/ngc: No such file or directory

[22:00:37] ‘build.aot’ errored after 19 ms

[22:00:37] Error: Command failed: node_modules/.bin/ngc -p tsconfig-aot.json

at checkExecSyncError (child_process.js:473:13)

at Object.execSync (child_process.js:513:13)

at Object.exports.run (/var/www/Minds/front/tools/utils/run.ts:24:16)

at Gulp.<anonymous> (/var/www/Minds/front/tools/tasks/build.aot.ts:6:3)

at module.exports (/var/www/Minds/front/node_modules/orchestrator/lib/runTask.js:34:7)

at Gulp.Orchestrator._runTask (/var/www/Minds/front/node_modules/orchestrator/index.js:273:3)

at Gulp.Orchestrator._runStep (/var/www/Minds/front/node_modules/orchestrator/index.js:214:10)

at Gulp.Orchestrator.start (/var/www/Minds/front/node_modules/orchestrator/index.js:134:8)

at runNextSet (/var/www/Minds/front/node_modules/run-sequence/index.js:123:15)

at Gulp.onTaskEnd (/var/www/Minds/front/node_modules/run-sequence/index.js:101:4)

[22:00:37] ‘build’ errored after 15 s