FreedomBox is a personal server that protects your privacy. It is a free software stack, a subset of the Debian universal operating system, that can be installed in many flavors of inexpensive and power-efficient hardware. FreedomBox runs in a physical computer and can route your traffic. It can sit between various devices at home such as mobiles, laptops and TVs and the Internet replacing a home wireless router. By routing traffic, FreedomBox can remove tracking advertisements and malicious web bugs before they ever reach your devices. FreedomBox can cloak your location and protect your anonymity by “onion routing” your traffic over Tor. FreedomBox provides a VPN server that you can use while you are away from home to keep your traffic secret on untrusted public wireless networks and to securely access various devices at home. It can also be carried along with your laptop and used to connect to public networks at work, school, or office to avail its services. It could be used in a village to provide communications throughout the village. In future, FreedomBox intends to provide support for alternative ways of connecting to the Internet such as Mesh networks.
FreedomBox provides services: to your computers and mobile devices in your home and to computers and mobile devices of other people who are your friends. It provides file sharing like Dropbox, shared calendaring like Google or Yahoo and photo sharing. FreedomBox provides instant messaging and secure voice conference calling that works on low bandwidth providing high quality. FreedomBox has a blog and wiki to let you publish your content and collaborate with the rest of the world. Coming soon, a personal email server and federated social networking using GNU Social and Diaspora, providing privacy-respecting alternatives to Gmail and Facebook.
Too many of us live in a world where our use of the network is mediated by organizations that often do not have our best interests at heart. By building software that does not rely on a central service, we can regain control and privacy. By keeping our data in our homes, we gain useful legal protections over it. By giving back power to the users over their networks and machines, we are returning the Internet to its intended peer-to-peer architecture. In order to bring about the new network order, it is paramount that it is easy to convert to it. The hardware it runs on must be cheap. The software it runs on must be easy to install and administrate by anybody. It must be easy to transition from existing services. There are a number of projects working to realize a future of distributed services; FreedomBox aims to bring them all together in a convenient package available for everybody.