Principles of F2F

However, WWW is not good for sensitive information. In life, people often tell their family different things from what they tell their friends, or strangers, or the IRS. WWW has no way of doing this (passwords are an incomplete afterthought), since all a webserver knows (if anything) is the IP address of where the client is coming from.

Friend2Friend meets this need since the protocol uses strong cryptography, so every communication is digitally signed. Individual servers only contact their friends directly, but can ask friends to contact their friends, and so on. This means that information need can be securely aggregated between different sites, offering an alternative to centralised control of data. Using F2F does not require any trust in organisations, but does require trust in specific individuals (friends) - who are your neighbours in the network. The network has reach because they in turn trust their friends, and so on. F2F challenges the mentality that isolates us from one another, cutting us off an leaving us disconnected from our communities, our networks of care.

"The problem with the world is that we draw the circle of our family too small."     Mother Teresa of Kolkata

Like altruistic economics, Friend2Friend is a system with no one in control. Everyone is in a position of influence (proportional to the amount of trust that others choose to give them) but no one can disable anyone else's use of it.