Europe recognizes Privacy, and it's starting with CryptPad

Europe's Next Generation Internet initiative (NGI.eu) awarded CryptPad the Next Generation Internet’s Privacy and trust-enhanced technologies startup award. The NGI Startup Awards recognize Europe’s most disruptive entrepreneurs who are advancing revolutionary products, solutions and services destined to have a major impact on the internet of the future.

Of course XWiki SAS and the CryptPad team are very proud of this award for a project that was started 4 years ago by Caleb James DeLisle as part of a French research project funding realtime editing in XWiki. The first commit "and so it begins" was premonitory of a long and important project.

But most importantly we are very happy that privacy enhancing technologies are getting recognized. We strongly believe that users of internet technologies should be able to control their privacy and the security of their data, and unfortunately this is not the case today. The dominating business model of the Internet is advertisement based on exploiting user data ("Your data is their data"). Cloud providers have full access to most of users' and companies' private data, which is being exposed to many risks.

Our promise is that our software cannot spy on its users, and that your data is safe.

We are also very happy that our users and supporters are recognized. Since we launched our online service CryptPad.fr as part of the OpenPaaS-NG research project, funded by BPI France, CryptPad's usage and support has continously grown. With more than 10000 users weekly and also the support from paying users and donations through our Open Collective, we are all participating in helping restore our privacy.

It is difficult for all of us to give up powerful Internet services and software which bring us great value, but at the same time we do not like to see how our data is being used for advertisement, political means or malicious hacking. Today this NGI Award is showing that it is possible to take back our privacy, while getting powerful and easy to use services. We built CryptPad to show how far a team can go to empower users and increase their expectation of privacy from online services. While it was previously accepted that collaborative editing meant sacrificing confidentiality, we’ve not only proven that private editing is possible, but we’ve made our entire platform open source to ensure that this technology remains available.

Want to be a part of it?

• Use CryptPad and other Zero Knowledge services every day, tell us what you like and what we can do better.
• Talk to your friends and colleagues about Zero Knowledge, show them CryptPad and explain that this is what the cloud can be.
• Candidate to XWiki SAS to join our team.

Show your support

• Buy an upgraded account from Cryptpad.fr, run by the CryptPad development team, or contribute to our Open Collective
• If you install the Open Source code of CryptPad on your own servers, consider buying a support contract.
• If you’re a web developer, think about Zero Knowledge for your next web app.

About CryptPad and XWiki SAS

CryptPad is an open-source, web-based suite of collaborative editors which employs client-side cryptography to ensure that the server is not able to access the contents of users’ documents. It offers a variety of editors and other multi-user applications: rich text, code editing with syntax highlighting and markdown preview, presentations, polls for scheduling, kanbans for project management, and whiteboards for collaborative illustration.

CryptPad is being actively developed by XWiki SAS and is currently funded by BPI France as part of the OpenPaaS NG research project. For the last 14 years, XWiki SAS has built Open Source Collaboration Software and provided professional services allowing organizations to better organize their information.

About the NGI Initiative and awards

NGI is Europe’s new approach to creating a more human-centric internet. It invites citizens and communities striving for values like openness, inclusivity, transparency, privacy, cooperation, and data protection to provide input, and thus to help to guide the European Next Generation Internet funding agenda. NGI is a European Commission initiative which is being implemented by project partners throughout Europe.

The overall mission of the Next Generation Internet initiative is to re-imagine and re-engineer the Internet for the third millennium and beyond. We envision the information age will be an era that brings out the best in all of us. We want to enable human potential, mobility and creativity at the largest possible scale – while dealing responsibly with our natural resources. In order to preserve and expand the European way of life, we shape a value-centric, human and inclusive Internet for all.