Privacy by design: why SimoneBox will never be in the cloud or on social networks

This isn't an ideological stance. It isn't groundless distrust of big technology companies. It's a careful reading of what these services ask in return. And a decision made with full awareness of what's at stake.

What you sign without reading

When you create an account on a connected photo frame or a family sharing platform, you accept terms and conditions. Nobody reads them. I didn't read them either, at first. But I eventually did.

In those contracts, there is typically a clause that says, in effect: by uploading content to our platform, you grant us a worldwide, non-exclusive, transferable, sublicensable, royalty-free licence to use, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, distribute and display that content.

Translation: your photos are still yours. But the company can do pretty much whatever it wants with them.

For a holiday album shared between consenting adults, you might live with that. For photos of an elderly person, sometimes unwell, in the privacy of their daily life — it's a different matter entirely.

Your photos inside an AI

Today, all of this data is being used for something new. It feeds artificial intelligence. Image generation models, facial recognition systems, behavioural analysis tools — all of it runs on real photos. Yours. Your mother's.

Nobody knows exactly what this data will become in ten years. The companies themselves often don't know. But once your photos are on a server somewhere, you no longer have any say.

That's something I find hard to accept for family photos. For images of an elderly person captured in their living room, day after day. It isn't paranoia — it's simply a question of control over what belongs to us.

Eyes in your living room

There's something more concrete still. An elderly person living alone is also someone whose daily life — their habits, their difficult moments, their ordinary days — can become visible through shared photos.

A photo sent on a bad day. A tired face. A scene from inside the home. These are data points. Insurance companies could interpret them. Risk profiles could be derived from them. The line between a photo shared on a network and exploitable data is thinner than most people realise.

And then there's configuration. Social platforms are set by default to share widely. Many users don't know how to change that. Family photos sometimes end up seen by people who had no reason to see them — by accident, by ignorance, by a misunderstood privacy setting.

Our family photos are not there to enrich a database. Not to train an AI model. Not to build a risk profile.

My mother, a scam, and what it taught me

My mother was the target of a fraud attempt. People contacted her by phone after she had replied to a text message. Their aim was to steal money from her. She got through it. But it put me on alert.

Elderly people are targets. Cybercrime is growing, and artificial intelligence is making it more effective, more convincing, harder to detect. Synthetic voices, perfectly written messages, spoofed numbers — the tools exist and are becoming accessible to anyone.

Reducing the attack surface is part of protecting against this. No public account. No presence on third-party platforms. No exploitable traces left behind. It's a security decision as much as a privacy decision.

My mother's Simone runs on her home network. It doesn't communicate with any external server to display a photo, show the time, or play the radio. It has no account. No login. It doesn't exist on the internet.

No algorithm. No advertising.

Social networks are designed for engagement. Their algorithms surface what holds attention — and what holds attention is often what shocks, moves, or irritates. That's not a criticism: it's their business model. But it isn't what an elderly person needs in their living room.

An elderly person doesn't need to scroll. They don't need adverts for products they won't buy. They don't need an algorithm recommending content based on their reading habits. They need photos of their family, a reliable weather forecast, and news they have chosen themselves.

The Simone only shows what it has been asked to show. Nothing more. That's a design decision, not a technical limitation.

GDPR: governments understood before most of us did

This isn't a niche concern. Europe adopted the General Data Protection Regulation in 2018 precisely because large-scale privacy breaches had taken place. Data had been collected, used and resold without meaningful consent. Fines now run into billions of euros.

These laws are useful. They set a framework. But they don't protect against what you voluntarily agree to sign. The strongest protection is not putting data somewhere it can be exploited. That's what's known as the minimisation principle: collect only what you need, keep it only as long as necessary.

SimoneBox's privacy policy is built on that principle. No data is stored on an external server. Photos never leave the home.

Simple code, minimal footprint

SimoneBox runs on a Raspberry Pi — a computer the size of a credit card, consuming less than 5 watts. The code running it is open. I know exactly what it does. I know exactly what it doesn't do.

The photos, the chosen news feeds, the weather data — all of it stays on the local network. No central server. No user account. No terms and conditions to accept.

This is what privacy by design means: privacy isn't a setting you activate later. It's the starting point. Baked into every technical decision, from the very first prototype.

This isn't against the internet

I want to be clear about this. I am not against social networks. The companies that built today's internet have created remarkable tools. I use them myself, in my own way, with my own guardrails.

But using them wisely means understanding what you're exchanging. And for an elderly person, often less equipped to navigate these settings, less aware of the implications — the most respectful decision is not to place them in that environment at all.

The Simone is closed. Familiar. Controlled. That isn't a limitation — it's a strength. And it's what makes trust possible.

If you want to understand what actually happens inside the system — how photos arrive, how news is chosen, how the screen organises itself — here's how SimoneBox works →