Peergos
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that every person has a right to privacy. Privacy is a critical right, without which democracy cannot survive. Regretfully, the current web and its services on it can, and often do, interfere with users’ privacy, typically through the incentives of surveillance capitalism.
Peergos embarked on a mission to counter that – and create a protocol for a better social web that structurally protects privacy and prevents the emergence of surveillance capitalist business models.
The What
Peergos is a peer-to-peer, end-to-end encrypted social web protocol. It enables people to easily create, share, and communicate online securely and privately. It offers a range of services, from basic file storage and sharing to calendar, document, and spreadsheet editors and video streaming, as well as a social feed. A Peergos server cannot interfere with or surveil the content of the users or their interactions.
Mainstream file-storage services are not focused on respecting the users’ privacy, in fact, in some cases it goes against their business model. On the other hand, grassroots projects created to guard privacy and security are often not intuitive and difficult to set up for a user without a significant computing background. Peergos offers a unique combination of privacy and usability. We believe that privacy is for everyone, and should not depend on technical prowess.
For What
Peergos provides a secure and private alternative to services such as Dropbox or Facebook. It has been used by individuals and a range of professionals, from lawyers, through business people to journalists and photographers and NGOs. We envisage it to be more widely used in contexts where data privacy is of utmost importance, which, these days, is everything online.
THE REACH
Because of the user-friendly interface and the ease with which files can be shared, Peergos can and already is being used by non-technical people. By design, we are making Peergos easily usable by all audiences. We have been recommended as one of the three top private storage services by the prestigious Privacy Guides Group. And our encrypted Calendar figures as the ‘go-to ‘Office and Work” solution’ on Privacy Tools.io.
THE MILESTONES
Peergos was chosen as one of the key Oxford University spin-offs and accepted into the Oxford Foundry business accelerator program in 2019. With support from NGI Pointer, Peergos was able to implement private social media, that is designed to empower end-users and protect democracy. Peergos won a subsequent grant from Protocol Labs for 250k GBP. Peergos has thousands of users including a self hosting community as well as those paying for a hosted version on peergos.net.
What started as a side project of four friends coding in a cafe every Wednesday evening, grew into a protocol for a better web that is ready to challenge big tech.
