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Almost all of our communication scheduling and data management takes place online in the digital age. The model of centralized data has long been entrenched in decades of history. This includes Google Calendar, Gmail, and a variety of other services that incorporate communication, scheduling, and storage in one single place.
However, these services are neither convenient nor without their risks in terms of both privacy and security. Most of these risks come from centralizing the sensitive data and giving it to a single entity, and then they don’t necessarily have any right of access, or when they’ve got the data, they break into the system, or even they will have the data and just spy on people.
An alternative model of decentralization promises a greater level of privacy and security for users. This decentralized calendar and email system relies on a network of independent nodes of which control and data are distributed and does not involve any central server or authority.
In this article, we present the concepts of decentralized calendars and emails, how they run, what benefits they provide for privacy and security, and the obstacles they face to large-scale adoption.
What Is Decentralization?
Before we dig in and see how decentralized calendars and emails might look, it’s important to understand what exactly decentralization means in the world of digital communication.
The data and servers that control that data are owned by one single company or entity in a centralized system. Let’s take Gmail, for example—all your emails are stored on Google’s servers, and Google controls that data.
Whereas decentralized systems spread this control and data across a network of nodes (servers or devices) on a network where no single entity owns or controls these nodes. Decentralized systems have no single point of failure in cryptography and/or storage of data into distributed forms among several participants.
First, this structure gives us several advantages over centralized alternatives, mainly in terms of privacy and security.
The Risks of Centralized Calendars and Emails
Calendars and emails have evolved from being central tools in personal and professional life. However, the use of these tools comes with significant risks.
Privacy Concerns
For the most part, there is a lot of personal data available for centralized services to see. With email services such as Gmail read and store emails for use to build user profiles for targeted advertising.
Sensitive information like personal appointments, locations, contacts, etc. can be accessed from a calendar service, just like everything else available. The data is centralized, that is, it is stored across centralized servers that are easy to hack, surveil, and invade privacy.
But centralized companies also usually work with governments and other such organizations to get the users’ data themselves, be it voluntarily or otherwise. Data-sharing agreements between tech titans and government agencies have also been raising eyebrows over user privacy.
Security Vulnerabilities
Data breaches and hacks are more likely to occur on centralized systems since they work on a single server or series of servers.
An attacker who gains access to one of these servers now has gained access to the entire database of a user’s information. Again and again, companies like Yahoo and Facebook have been breached, exposing millions of personal data of users of those sites.
In addition, centralized systems pose problems related to access control. If hackers can find and attack a single central server, they’ll be able to access the data of thousands of users, or even all their users.
However, a decentralized system eliminates this risk by scattering data among a number of nodes, making the system harder to entirely compromise than in a centralized system.
Central Author Dependence
With centralized email and calendar services, consumers become at the mercy of service providers. If a company were to remove a service or change its terms of service, users may have very little recourse available to them.
Especially with email, in which users can lose access to critical communications due to service shutdowns or changes in policy. Moreover, if a provider is under attack, it may face litigation or generally face the possibility of losing users and their data if it fails to meet its commitment to great care for its users.
Decentralized Calendars and Emails Provide Privacy and Security
Decentralization offers a tantalizing solution to privacy and security problems typical of centralized systems. A decentralized system does not have only one centralized entity in control and responsibility but rather control and responsibility are spread across a network of distributed networks of nodes.
Here’s how decentralized calendars and email systems improve privacy and security:
1. No Single Point of Failure
The data is not stored at one location instead it is spread over many nodes or P2P (peer-to-peer) servers. In other words, no single server can be hacked or seized by a malicious actor. As an example, ProtonMail or Tutanota takes a decentralized email service to someone to make sure no central authority has the contents of the users’ messages.
The data is encrypted on the user’s device and then sent while stored on servers that make up a so-called decentralized network. If an attacker compromises one node in the network, even if s/he can’t reach other nodes’ key it will encrypt the data on them.
2. End-to-End Encryption
End-to-end encryption is one of the features that make decentralized systems special. If you were to go to the example in email, the message would be encrypted on the sender side but only decrypted by the recipient. None of the contents of the communication can be read even by the email service provider.
By contrast, this kind of approach stands in stark contrast to centralized systems where the provider often has access to the content of the messages for advertising and other purposes.
Decentralized platforms for calendars may employ encryption to prevent personal scheduling information from ever being viewed by anyone other than the person who owns the calendar. Thus even if an attacker gains network access they can not read or alter the schedule without a copy of the private key or password.
3. Ownership and Control of Data
In a decentralized system, the user’s full control of the data stays with the user. The user stores their appointments and events on distributed storage systems or their own devices with decentralized calendars. Removing the need to trust the centralized provider with your data. It allows the user to choose where his/her data is stored and who can access it.
Decentralized email systems also work similarly by letting you handle your inboxes without needing to depend on a service provider to store your messages. Services such as ProtonMail and Tutanota offer encrypted infrastructure decentralized so that users do not need to compromise data control to safely send and receive emails.
4. Resilience Against Censorship
Centralized systems can be censored by the government or corporate. For example, a public or private entity will easily be able to stop access to certain communications and content on centralized systems. This is much harder in decentralized systems. As infrastructure is controlled by no central authority it is built in as censorship-resistant.
For instance, if an email provider or calendar service is taken offline or blocked in a country, decentralized alternatives would allow its users to continue using their services with as little disruption as possible. Even if some of these nodes are blocked or compromised the decentralized network can continue to run.
5. Transparency and Auditing
Transparency at a higher level than a centralized counterpart can also be provided by a decentralized system. A lot of decentralized email services are open source their code is published and anyone can look through and verify it. This allows the community to audit the system for security vulnerabilities or backdoors which could break user privacy.
Similarly in the decentralized calendars, the same open-source approaches can be applied for the security of the system and no unauthorized entity can access the data.
Decentralized Calendars and Emails Make for Tough Challenges
Decentralized calendars and emails are hugely valuable until the barriers to adoption are overcome. These include:
1. User Experience and Usability
The user experience is one of the biggest barriers to adoption. Centralized services such as Google Calendar or Gmail are already serving as the seamless and intuitive interfaces to which many users have become used.
Decentralized alternatives are often more technologically complex to set up and use meaning less tech-savvy people are likely to be deterred from switching over.
In addition, decentralized systems don’t necessarily feature the same level of integration and features that a centralized service might. For instance, the wide range of potential connectivity integrated with Google’s calendar (to all sorts of other apps – including email to Google Meet), is likely to be hard to match in a decentralized world.
2. Scalability
While there are advantages to using decentralized systems enhanced privacy and security, for example, they can also be castigated with scalability issues.
While centralized systems have economies of scale that allow them to become more efficient and cost-effective at handling big volumes of data, there are also risks brought about by the lack of splitting up your data in multiple computing facilities.
However, decentralized networks may need additional infrastructure and resources for the same level of performance. All this can translate to higher costs and potential delays in getting data processed especially with larger-scale systems such as email and calendars.
3. Interoperability
Interoperability is one of the challenges of decentralized systems. The goal of centralized services like Gmail and Google Calendar is to seamlessly work with any variety of devices and platforms.
However, decentralized services lack this level of compatibility. For example, users of decentralized email services may have trouble communicating with those using centralized services if both can’t use the same protocol or standard.
4. Adoption and Network Effects
Perhaps another challenge is the network effect. A large user base is a good thing for centralized services because they tend to have many users that start using the service simply because there are other users already on it.
If reliable decentralized alternatives exist, then this is a hurdle they must overcome by convincing users of the benefits of enhanced privacy and security even at the expense of some convenience.
Conclusion
Private and secure decentralized calendars and email systems are available and are a better choice. Decentralization frees the user from central authorities protects them from the risks of hacking, surveillance, and censorship, and allows users to keep control of their data.
By offering these systems there’s a robust alternative to centralized services where the privacy and safety of the data are prioritized.
While some of these issues are addressed, there are further challenges of usability, scalability, and interoperability that need to be overcome before such systems become mainstream.
As technology only gets better and more people are familiar with the risks of having all of their communications and schedules centralized and decentralized options will probably become more popular and may even change how we communicate and schedule our lives.