Remove third party CDN libraries and dependencies

There is growing concern about web surveillance, both by governments and the private sector. It is noted that including libraries from third parties, such as Google or Facebook, allows them to track people.

Please consider removing third party tracking software from Sovereign. Rather, include any necessary fonts, media, etc, in the project source. This way, Sovereign is truly sovereign.

Examples

In head.html are the following snippets:

<!-- Google -->
<script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/webfont/1.4.7/webfont.js"></script>

When clients load content from googleapis.com, Google is able to track them across the web.

There is also a link to Amazon CDN in the head.html:

<meta property="og:image" content="https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/democracyearth/landing/earthflag.jpg">

Additionally, when starting a fresh instance of Soverign, there are server console warnings about several third party services:

• Amazon Web Services
• Mailgun
• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google Analytics

Corporate nation-states

In effect, when we rely so heavily on centrally controlled, third-party services, we are simply reflecting the global corporate hegemony we are trying so hard to disrupt.

References

• How Online Tracking Companies Know Most of What You Do Online
• The Future of Democracy | Santiago Siri

[santisiri]

Couldn’t agree more with this. Great observation, will do.

(We’ll be integrating with IPFS soon, so that should help avoid us calling AWS)

[santisiri]

Excellent work.