Why I am Migrating: Privacy, Control, Trust, and Reducing Platform Dependence

My old workflow was held together with expensive duct tape and false promises — layers of SaaS programs that weren’t optimized for my needs, came with fees on top of fees, introduced security vulnerabilities and privacy concerns, and created significant regulatory exposure under laws like California’s digital subscription requirements and EU GDPR.

How I Got Here

Instead of privacy-respecting video conferencing, I was using Zoom. One glance through their privacy policy and you would never want to have a video call again. The irony is that switching to better tools does not automatically solve the friction problem. I spent an hour recently trying to get a tech developer — a tech developer — onto a simple call. He used Safari despite my instructions, forgot to turn his mic on, and had all his passwords stored in Safari so he couldn’t even access LinkedIn to find my login instructions. This kind of friction is real and it does not disappear just because you chose a better platform. With just a small amount of research though, I realized I could record locally and save to my own computer — no third-party cloud storage of sensitive conversations, real data sovereignty. This matters especially for the unconventional entrepreneurs I work with, who are already paranoid on a good day and are forced to compromise on basic security just to get funding.

European privacy law requirements made the math brutally clear: compliance managers, extravagant legal fees, and extra SaaS programs piled on top of each other — and none of it would actually solve the problem. To be honest, I am not sure there is a way to handle these concerns effectively within the existing architectures and business structures.

One thing the existing processes do is prevent small creative people from feeling comfortable starting their own businesses. I can’t tell you how much time I have spent modeling costs and trying to find ways to make things possible, especially in areas of high regulatory oversight. That is the last thing we should be encouraging. Leaving centralized, extractive, monopolistic, high-friction services and products in place and then adding burdensome regulations on top is far from a first-principles engineering approach.

Read the rest of this essay on Lynn Marie's Digital Garden