Neone, a company that claims to be “on a mission to make social media fun, safe and private again,” today launched a private, secure and ad-free social media service “to build community with people you truly care about”.
However, the overblown expectation it is attempting to create around being a “privacy utopia” may well prove its undoing.
Founded by free speech and privacy advocate Dave Glassco, Neone was created in response to those “fed up with data privacy violations like Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal, tired of data breaches from media giants like Facebook, Google and Yahoo that expose your personal data on the web, and for those who can no longer tell real users from bots on Twitter”.
“Social media was supposed to be fun, safe and private — a place where users could share their interests and news with friends, family and followers,” said Glassco. “Instead, social media has become a minefield of advertising, data tracking and mining, and media manipulation. Today’s social media is increasingly anti-social and privacy invasive.”
In a 2019 study, Edison Research found that while 80% of Americans post, tweet or snap on social platforms, fewer are doing so on Facebook — the platform lost an estimated 15 million users over the last two years, with the largest exodus occurring among 12- to 34-year-olds.
Neone provided the following information:
When you create a Neone account, you gain access to a privacy utopia — a friendly, self-contained network where you and your friends can build and enjoy the community you want. Neone saves you from:
- Unauthorized third-party data sharing that leads to massive privacy violations and data breaches
- Media manipulation and deep fakes from bots that polarize online conversations
- Creepy personalized ads that follow your social media journey
- The constant barrage of negative news and updates that clutter your feed
- Awkward, unwanted friend invitations from total strangers
- Vicious online stalking and trolling by intrusive interlopers
Get the Benefits of a “By-Invitation-Only” Social Media Experience
Your Neone experience enables you to post and share messages, images, videos and other content in by-invitation-only groups comprised of real people. Neone doesn’t bombard you with unwanted advertising, doesn’t sell your personal data and doesn’t track your movements and browsing habits. You and your community are in complete control of community membership and content.
Control Your Data Forever with Neone
So how do we ensure that Neone stays fun and safe forever? Neone is a subscription-based service. Subscriptions start at just $4.99 a month and subscribers can invite their friends onto Neone for free. Subscribers and their guests have complete and permanent control over their community and their data.
How does that control work? For each subscription, Neone creates a secure, encrypted container (we call them “hubs”) for personal and community data and connections. Neone does not search inside your hub or mine the data there. Also, every time a Neone user connects to their Neone community, the connection occurs over SSH-encrypted tunnels. At rest and in transit, user data is secured with 256-bit AES encryption.
Get Started with Neone Today
Just download the Neone mobile app and select a trial subscription. Every subscription creates a dedicated Neone hub — a meeting place and container for social content, hosted in the cloud. You can invite friends, family members and other social connections as Neone guests without worrying about exposing content to strangers and marketers. And you can connect to other Neone users on other hubs, creating a truly social network. Neone can’t (and won’t) mine, distribute or resell information posted by hub users, nor sell ad space to third parties.
“Social media went from fun online interaction to a commerce-heavy activity fraught with threats to privacy and to individual well-being — risks from malware, trolls, stalking and mining and leaking personal data,” Glassco explained. “We launched Neone to bring social media back to the experience we crave and deserve.”
Neone Features
The Neone social media platform features:
- Safe sharing of social posts with links, images, audio, video and other documents (even spreadsheets and word processing documents)
- No ads, tracking, data mining or influence campaigns
- Customisable user profiles and simple user management
- The Neone app for iOS 12 and 13
- Fully encrypted social hubs and communications
- A privacy policy that is compliant with CCPA and other national and regional statutes
- Neone subscriptions — starting at $4.99/month — allow subscribers to invite friends, family and colleagues as free guests to join a private Neone social hub
- Sustainable business model — no need to up-sell or nickel-and-dime users with surprise charges for media types or incremental capabilities
Neone subscriptions can accommodate tight-knit groups of friends with as few as six users up to extended families and far-reaching social networks with thousands of members. Users can limit themselves to a single hub or join as users on others’ hubs as they choose, by invitation only.
Future versions of Neone will include support for other client software platforms (Android, Windows, MacOS), new media formats, inter-hub bridging, and features to support business applications (intranet, etc.).