In October 2012 I announced the first version of the User Data Manifesto during the Latinoware Keynote in Brazil. The idea was to define some basic right that all users should have in the digital age. This was still before the Snowden revelations. But it was already very clear that the privacy and security is at risk by cloud services and SaaS solutions that totally ignore the rights and interests of their users. So the idea was to try to define what this rights should be in the internet age.

The version 1.0 was instantly very popular and I got a ton of positive feedback and support. But over the time it also became clear that a few things could be expressed in a simpler and clearer way. So the idea came up to do a revision of the manifesto based on all the feedback.

During last years ownCloud Contributor Conference Hugo Roy from FSFE and ToS;DR, Jan-C. Borchardt and I started to work on the version 2. Now one year later I’m super happy to say that Hugo launched the new version of the manifesto during the ownCloud Contributor Conference keynote here in Berlin just a few minutes ago.
This is the result of a lot of discussion and the input from a lot of people and organizations. I’m also super proud to say that several well known organization are official launch partners of this 2.0 version of the manifesto and support the manifesto and the ideas behind this. This supporters are:

• KDE
• GNOME
• Free Software Foundation Europe
• Netzpolitik.org
• X-Lab
• ToS;DR
• Spreed
• ownCloud More information about the manifesto can be found here

I hope that this Manifesto helps to promote the importance of privacy, data protection, security and control over the own data in the cloud age.
If your organization, company or open source project wants to help to push this forward and want to support this manifesto then please send me a message and we will add you to the list of supporters.