Exploring Privacy and Security as Drivers for Environmental Sustainability in Cloud-Based Office Solutions

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 services selected to reflect different privacy policies, from ad-supported tracking-intensive models to privacy-focused designs: Microsoft Outlook, Google Mail (Gmail), and Proton Mail. We extend this comparison to a self-hosted email solution, evaluated with and without end-to-end encryption. We show that the self-hosted solution, even with 14% of device energy and 15% of emissions overheads from PGP encryption, remains the most energy-efficient, saving up to 33% of emissions per session compared to Gmail. Among commercial providers, Proton Mail is the most efficient, saving up to 0.1 gCO2 e per session compared to Outlook, whose emissions can be further reduced by 2% through ad-blocking.