The Fallacy of Convenience
You start typing an email in Gmail on your PC at home, but you’re interrupted. Then, it’s time to go to work. At work, you fire up your iMac and remember you never finished that email. But look at that! Google magically saved the draft for you and you can now continue it. You finish the email and send it, then you run a quick Google search for topics for your next blog post. With a blog post in mind, you open up Google Docs and start typing. Later that night, your husband is using your PC, so you grab his MacBook Air, log into Google, and open the Doc you had started earlier in the day.
It’s all so damn convenient, right? And that’s what Google and Facebook and Amazon, and every other large centralized service is selling you. Convenience. But there’s a trade-off for that convenience. While Google claims not to use any of the data in your Docs and Drive, their terms of use explicitly grant them license to these files. And we know they use your search history and track everything you do everywhere else. Facebook is no different, aside from possibly being worse about this. But you accept it because for the last two decades, companies like Google have sold the public on the fallacy of convenience.
The fallacy goes something like this:
To have access to convenient, cheap tools to get work done, to help your creative side grow, to communicate and connect, you have to be willing to give up some of your privacy, right?. Google and others would have you believe it’s a small trade-off. By sharing data, you allow Google to connect you with optimized search results, with people you really should meet, with ads that you might actually want to click on. And, on the side, they will give you cloud access to your mail, documents, spreadsheets, and more.
But that convenience is achievable without the tradeoff. That’s what they don’t want people to know or believe. The scenario that opened this post is entirely possible in a decentralized and encrypted world.
The convenience of cloud computing and the privacy offered by distributed systems is not only possible, it’s available now. Graphite allows you to create documents and spreadsheets on one device, move to another device, and keep working. Graphite enables people to build curated lists of contacts to control their communication and control the people with whom they share files. And conversations in Graphite happen in real-time. There is no trade-off. The fallacy is shattered.
If you’re ready to own your data and never worry about Google having access to your personal information again, give Graphite a shot. It’s ready.
