Privacy in a Context means that aside from the present participants, nobody else has access to the Context and the data exchanged within it. Additionally, it means that the data generated during collaboration within a Context remains the property of the participants and nobody else. The Perspective Platform guarantees these aspects of Privacy.
Perspectives Distributed Runtime
How? By ensuring that only the participants in a Context receive the data on their devices that they need to fulfil their role in the Context. What that data is, is accurately modeled in the Perspectives language. The Perspectives Platform calculates precisely, based on the model, who should receive which data without the intervention of a server. Therefore not as usual via a server that provides the (chat) service and walks away with the data. Moreover, the messages exchanged between the participants’ devices are encrypted end-to-end so that they are also safe on the way.
Why only now such a platform? The main reason is that the devices people use for collaboration, such as laptops, tablets, and smartphones, are now so powerful and contain so much memory that they can easily handle the resources needed for such a distributed platform. And that will only become more favorable in the future.
The next chapter provides a more extensive and detailed description of the Privacy advantages of the Perspectives Plarform.
Why the Perspectives Platform Excels at Privacy: Beyond Decentralization
In today’s digital landscape, privacy is more than a feature—it’s a fundamental requirement. As centralized systems expose users to surveillance, profiling, and data leaks, many have turned to decentralized architectures as a remedy. But decentralization alone is not enough. The Perspectives Platform goes further by implementing a truly distributed, role-aware, and context-driven model that addresses the shortcomings of both centralized and decentralized approaches.
This document explains in detail how and why the Perspectives Platform offers superior privacy features, and how these are fundamentally different from what is typically achieved through decentralized systems.
1. Decentralization Still Relies on Servers
Decentralized systems (like blockchain, federated servers, or peer-to-peer platforms) often improve on centralized models by distributing control. However, they still depend on servers to operate—each operated by individuals or organizations with their own policies and risks:
- Users depend on administrators of the server they’re registered with.
- If a server is shut down, users lose access and data.
- Running servers costs money and energy, leading to dependency on funding or monetization models.
- Servers still collect or transmit user data, creating points of potential surveillance.
This means that while decentralized platforms may distribute authority, they do not eliminate the exposure of user data to third parties.
2. The Perspectives Platform is Truly Distributed—No Central or Local Servers
The Perspectives Platform takes a fundamentally different approach: it is fully distributed with no servers at all, not even local ones. There is no single point—or even multiple known points—where data is stored, gathered, or managed by external parties.
Instead, each participant in a Context holds their own relevant data, and data is exchanged directly between collaborators. There is no third party involved in message exchange or data synchronization.
This architecture provides zero exposure to unauthorized parties by design:
- No one outside a collaboration can access or intercept data.
- No administrator or provider holds a copy of your data.
- No data is stored in places it doesn’t need to be.
3. Privacy Through Contextual Role-Based Modeling
The core of Perspectives privacy lies in how information visibility is strictly tied to a user’s role in a context:
- Each Role defines exactly what a user can see, create, or modify.
- A Perspective explicitly limits which properties of other roles are visible to a user.
- If a user has no role in a Context, they know nothing about it—not even that it exists.
This is radically different from many systems where users technically don’t have access to data, but still “see” the structure, metadata, or presence of others. In Perspectives, if you don’t play a role in a context, it’s as if that context does not exist for you at all.
Thus, privacy is not just enforced technically, it is also cognitively preserved. Users can’t even become curious about what they cannot see.
4. No Metadata Leakage
Even in decentralized systems, metadata can leak:
- Who connected to whom
- When data was transmitted
- What resources were accessed
The Perspectives Platform avoids this by:
- Using opportunistic peer-to-peer message delivery (no central routing)
- Having no global namespace or user registry
- Not exposing network-level or application-level identifiers
This ensures no third party can analyze traffic patterns or draw conclusions about user behavior, affiliations, or interests.
5. Post Office Mechanism Without Surveillance
One practical issue with distributed systems is message delivery when participants are not online. Perspectives solves this with a peer-based post office mechanism:
- Peers store undelivered messages only for others in the same context.
- Messages are encrypted, and post office peers cannot read them.
- Delivery is opportunistic: when a peer comes online, it checks with other participants and retrieves what it missed.
Because only context participants act as message relays—and they don’t even know the content of what they’re relaying—this preserves privacy while ensuring availability.
This is similar to distributed messaging systems like secure delay-tolerant networks (DTNs), but modeled directly within the logic of the app itself.
6. No Infrastructure Dependency, No Surveillance Surface
By avoiding servers entirely, Perspectives reduces the surveillance surface to almost zero:
- No cloud hosting providers to subpoena
- No APIs to monitor
- No backend logs to collect
- No central databases to hack
This architecture removes the need for compliance with third-party data protection rules because there is no third party. Privacy is enforced by architecture, not by contract.
7. Sustainability and Privacy Go Hand in Hand
Privacy and sustainability are often in tension: more encryption, more computation, more storage. But Perspectives flips the equation:
- No idle servers consuming power 24/7
- No need for redundant replication
- Less data duplication across nodes
By sending only the exact data needed for a role in context, the system reduces data volume and energy usage—while increasing privacy.
8. Privacy is a Built-In Consequence, Not an Add-On Feature
In many platforms, privacy is added later through access controls, encryption layers, or legal agreements. In the Perspectives Platform:
- Privacy emerges from the core modeling language (Roles, Contexts, Perspectives).
- The architecture is built to avoid storing or transmitting unneeded data.
- Every part of the user experience is shaped by what a role is permitted to see and do.
This tight coupling of design, model, and runtime means there’s no room for accidental exposure or misconfiguration.