====OLOFF    |     Explainer====

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**Why? – Because living offline and unconstrained online activity are becoming ever harder**
 
The ongoing digitalization of society has resulted in “the app” and “your smartphone” acquiring a truly commanding position in our public and private lives. Digital devices and online data traffic have smoothly conquered crucial positions, having made themselves seemingly indispensable in fields as varied as making appointments, social and family life, conferring, planning and making journeys, buying tickets, health care, banking and identification.

With the rise of such digital technology, alternative possibilities to gain access to information, products, and services are disappearing apace. People who do not want or are unable to use a smartphone are finding themselves increasingly blocked from participation in public life. Situations involving ‘digital coercion’ are taking increasingly extreme forms:
  * Open a bank account? Without a smartphone you’re simply no longer welcome at some banks. At the same time, smartphone users are supposed to have no qualms in making themselves dependent on either Google or Apple.
  * Hire a car from MyWheels? All you really needed until 2024 was a driver’s license; as from that year people without smartphone are excluded.
  * More and more services require two-factor authentication (2FA), implicitly assuming users to have a smartphone and failing to point out backdoors even if they exist.
  * Checking solar-panel output, switching lamps on and off, controlling a hearing aid, driving a car and locking one’s bike – more and more daily operations are being made dependent on our mobile, individual, permanent online connection.

Meanwhile, increasing domination of the internet by commercial and political interests, influencing people and acquiring their personal information, is being progressively normalized. This has negative consequences for people’s privacy, peace of mind, and powers of concentration, for the mental and physical development of children, and for the interrelations of citizens and public authorities.

Also consider issues ranging from fake news and polarization to excessive consumption of energy, the amassing of power in hands not subject to scrutiny, and the scale of the havoc wrought by potential power outages or data leaks. There is too little serious weighing of advantages against disadvantages. 

Liberty to live one’s own online life and freedom to live entirely offline are important values for all of us, individually and collectively. They constitute an essential condition for human freedom.

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**What does OLOFF hope to achieve?**

We, an informal group of citizens, are frankly worried about the waning of online liberty and offline freedom and want to do our bit in halting and reversing the trend. We aim to help ensuring that direct human contact and offline participation remains technically viable and fully accessible in practice, for all people everywhere. Organizations must maintain functioning lines of communication by telephone and post; doctors and dentists must remain available for evey individual regardless of any online capacities; paying for all goods and services should remain possible without the buyer leaving any digital trail; and so on and so forth.

At the same time, we insist on the importance of an open internet and open-source apps and operating systems offering genuine privacy, transparency, and freedom of choice. It must be routinely possible for every individual using a smartphone, app, or website to have total assurance that their personal information is not being collected and sold to the highest bidder.

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**What are we going to do?**

  * Collecting and publishing tips for Online Liberty and Offline Freedom
We offer a place to collect documented information about current OLOFF-related developments. When sufficient material has been collected, we will pursue publicity in consultation with those involved. We aim to build up a review or catalogue of helpful insights and organizations aimed at offering practical support, publishing such insights on the website and/or though a newsletter.

  * Developing an OLOFF quality mark 
Many organizations find themselves adopting digital technologies which, in effect if not deliberately, serve to rob individuals of opportunities both for online participation on their own terms and for any offline participation at all. We are therefore working to develop a quality helping such organizations to counter and reverse this trend by showing their commitment to welcoming people who cherish online liberty and offline freedom.

  * Work together with related (social) organizations
Many societal groups and organizations already share our worries over digital exclusion. Each in its own field, they are making efforts to preserve or restore our online liberty and offline freedom and support people in their individual efforts. But perhaps too many efforts are being made individually where they might better be joined. We work to achieve better cooperation.\\ \\