PrivacySafe and 3NWeb: Engineering User-Centric Digital Sovereignty

The talk opens with a goal: people want to control the technology they use, trust it, and still find it convenient. Mikalai Birukou contrasts classical federation, like email, where the client tells its own server where each message should go, leaving providers a full record of who talks to whom, with web-style federation. In the latter, a sending client looks up the recipient's service through DNS and connects directly, so communication does not depend on providers cooperating.

Using a two-person messaging example, he shows how messages are encrypted on the device and dropped as opaque blobs into the recipient's inbox, so the server learns neither sender nor content. Recipients confirm senders cryptographically. Encrypted file sync follows the same pattern with randomly named blobs. He admits the first-contact problem has no complete solution, favors physical key exchange, and says the modular design lets other methods plug in. Audience questions covered DNS hijacking and denial-of-service through large junk messages, answered with limited server visibility and size-hinting tricks.

The live PrivacySafe demo covered account creation on a custom domain configured through a DNS text record, password-derived keys that could be swapped for hardware tokens, group chats, separate app containers, and a Linux phone build. The takeaway is that the platform keeps the server side nearly empty of useful data, and app code runs in isolated runtimes, so developers and organizations can build services where users remain in control.