You should always be in control of the main way people identify you online. In today's internet age, that is your email address. Your email address is what you use to login to everything else: your bank, your online file storage, your social media accounts. Does your email look like john.smith@google.com? If so, because Google owns google.com, Google then also owns your identity, and by proxy Google now owns all your other accounts.

Of course, this principles applies to more than just your email. In the future, your online identity may be connected to your cryptocurrency wallet. Make sure to own that to. If you let a company own it for convenience... well, we've seen how that has gone for some crypto early adopters.

You should always be in control of your personal data: your family's photos, files, notes, to-do lists, contacts, calendars, etc. This means controlling exactly who has access to your data and what it is used for. If your data is stored in a data center at a large company, you have no idea who has access to it or what they are doing with it. If instead your data is stored only on your own devices and not synced to the cloud, then it remains within your control.

On top of owning your identity and data, you should also own your own network and server(s), so that you can freely interact with and access your data without any external dependence. By being able to run your own services, you can approach the internet from a position of strength, because you always have a safe place to fallback to. You can exercise your free speech knowing that if you are canceled, you can always come back to the safety of your own systems that cannot be touched. You have the freedom to choose if and when to sign up for externally-hosted services, and you can do so on your terms.

Use our Cyber Inventory Tool to take inventory of your family's technology usage. This includes what cloud services you use and what you are paying for them and what technology you have at home such as old computers, networking gear, or NAS devices.

Once you've cataloged what you have now and what you are paying monthly, we can show how much simpler life could be if you took ownership of your data, and how much you could save in the long run by having one system for may of your family's core technology needs.

If you want the simplest path to cyber ownership, you can simply buy one of our home servers that are preloaded with our Iolite platform; all you have to do is plug it in. If you want to save money, have some technical skills, and already have old computers laying around that could do the trick, you could buy a software license instead and install Iolite yourself. Either way, we'll walk you through each decision and make sure you have the information you need to make the best purchase for your family.

Once you have a home server up and running, you can add user accounts for everyone in your family and start installing apps. These apps are open-source alternatives to the apps you are already used to, and have been optimized to run on home servers. We host a secure repository of these applications in our data center, so that you can be confident that each one has been tested and vetted.

We've written import tools that can download all of the data on your various cloud services to your home server, so that you can have all of your photos, files, emails, contacts, calendars, and more in one place. Don't worry about moving everything at once. Take on one service at a time, and give you family time to adjust before moving on to the next.

Your photos and files are important to you, and so we wanted to make sure you have a simple and secure way to backup all of your data in case of a disaster. If you would like, your home server can send an encrypted copy of your data to our data center for safe keeping. Don't worry, we have no way of decrypting the backup and seeing your data, you alone own the encryption key. Our backup service also protects your data against ransomware and supports data recovery, in case you accidentally delete something important.

When you are at your house with the server, you can always access all of your apps directly without any traffic leaving your house. When you leave your house, we've made it simple to stay connected in a secure and private way. As long as your Internet Service Provider (ISP) allows it, your phone or laptop will be able to connect directly to your home server over the internet using an encrypted VPN tunnel. For cases where your ISP is more restrictive, leaving you with a Double NAT situation or a frequently changing public IP address, we've got you covered with domain management and proxy services available through our datacenter.

Now, sit back and relax, knowing that you own your family's data and you no longer have to worry about companies going out of business, hackers absconding with your precious files, or advertisers building profiles based on your online activity. We plan to stick around for the long haul and keep serving your family, but the nature of owning your home server means that even if we go out of business, you can keep using the exact same services and you always have full access to your data.