Why You Don’t Own Your Collaborative Documents

Unless you’re using Graphite.

When you work on a document, you often have to work collaboratively. Whether it’s at work, at school, or at home, you create a document, share it, and work on it in real-time. But when you use Google Docs or Dropbox Paper or any similar apps, you don’t own the document you are working on.

What’s actually happening when you share a document in Google Docs? First, you’re saving that document to a database owned by Google, not by you. Then, when you share that document, you are doing nothing more than giving someone else (in addition to Google) access to that file in Google’s database. No encryption (that you manage). No privacy.

That’s not the case with Graphite.

Graphite Is Changing Collaboration

With real-time collaboration in Graphite, you can share a document with the same convenience as Google or Dropbox provides. However, you own your document. The person you’ve shared with owns their document. It’s not a single file owned by a company and managed by that company. It is multiple documents, each owned by its own respective user. And yet, these users can still collaborate in real-time.

What you’re seeing in the demonstration is real-time collaboration without giving up ownership of the documents. To prove this, you can see both documents below. You’re not going to see much at the following links because everything is encrypted by the user that owns the file, but what you will notice is that each link is different. Each link represents the obfuscated path to the user’s storage hub and file.

Left Side: https://gaia.blockstack.org/hub/1M16iy9tw9x2KAiwJZUGRvkkJC5adqmuZb//documents/1535983293138.json

Right Side: https://gaia.blockstack.org/hub/1Q5G5kWwDikELELXc54tNdwTg8gbfnLKDU//documents/1535983293138.json

Why Does This Matter?

No other app in the world allows a user to maintain complete ownership (and encryption) of a file while collaborating with someone else in real-time. Graphite has unleashed, perhaps, the biggest potential upside of decentralized apps with this update.

Think of it this way: If Google had an outage or suffered a DDoS attack that made them go dark for days on end, would you be able to access your documents? Would you be able to collaborate and get work done?

If you are living or working in a hostile country where the government can, quite literally, flip the switch and shut of access to cloud storage providers, would you be able to access your documents?

With Graphite, you could. You own your files, you own your encryption keys, and you choose where your data is stored and how it’s replicated. But in addition to that, you get all of the convenience you’ve come to expect from Google Docs and Dropbox Paper.

If you’re ready to start owning your files, get started with Graphite today.