Exploring Privacy and Security as Drivers for Environmental Sustainability in Cloud-Based Office Solutions
Jason Kayembe, Iness Ben Guirat, Jan Tobias M\"uhlberg

TL;DR
This study investigates how privacy-focused cloud office solutions can be more environmentally sustainable by analyzing energy use and emissions, revealing that privacy-centric services like Proton Mail and self-hosted options are more eco-friendly.
Contribution
The paper introduces a framework for measuring environmental impact of cloud office services and compares the energy efficiency of different email providers based on privacy policies.
Findings
Self-hosted email solutions are more energy-efficient than mainstream providers.
Privacy-focused services like Proton Mail have lower carbon emissions per session.
Encryption adds some energy overhead but does not outweigh overall efficiency benefits.
Abstract
In this paper, we explore the intersection of privacy, security, and environmental sustainability in cloud-based office solutions, focusing on quantifying user- and network-side energy use and associated carbon emissions. We hypothesise that privacy-focused services are typically more energy-efficient than those funded through data collection and advertising. To evaluate this, we propose a framework that systematically measures environmental costs based on energy usage and network data traffic during well-defined, automated usage scenarios. To test our hypothesis, we first analyse how underlying architectures and business models, such as monetisation through personalised advertising, contribute to the environmental footprint of these services. We then explore existing methodologies and tools for software environmental impact assessment. We apply our framework to three mainstream email…
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Taxonomy
TopicsGreen IT and Sustainability · IoT and Edge/Fog Computing · Privacy, Security, and Data Protection
