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We live in a time where centralized structures are increasingly interfering in our lives. This applies to many areas of life, and especially to our digital lives. People's responses to this fact range from unawareness and ignorance to resignation and frustration.
What can you do as an average person?

Completely carefree with the cloud?

Big tech companies promise secure cloud solutions with attractive features that are available anywhere and anytime. Such offers are often free or very cheap. But beware—the convenience that cloud solutions offer is by no means free. Security promises such as "end-to-end encryption" sound good and suggest comprehensive data protection. In practice, however, this often only refers to encryption during transmission; metadata, profile data, and cloud backups are often excluded. A well-known example: WhatsApp advertised secure encryption for years, while automatically created chat backups were stored unencrypted in iCloud or Google Drive. This allowed Apple, Google, and authorities to easily access content – completely independently of WhatsApp itself.

The metadata generated when using messaging services alone reveals how often people contact each other, at what times, and to what extent. Long terms and conditions, which are often agreed to without much thought, also contain clauses that expressly permit the use and disclosure of personal data or even claim exclusive rights of use to users' own content.

Your data is valuable!

For years, data has been considered the fuel for the IT industry. Data that is willingly provided is used to create profiles that predict our behavior. The use of such profiles ranges from targeted product marketing to influencing voter opinions in democratic elections to political persecution. In the age of AI, your data is more valuable than ever, as it forms the basis for AI models. Without data, these models are worthless and cannot provide relevant answers.

To justify careless handling of their own data, people often use arguments such as "I'm so irrelevant, nobody cares anyway" or "what's the big deal, I have nothing to hide" But this is a fallacy for several reasons:

1. By using cloud services, you often unknowingly share data that does not belong to you.
   When it comes to data protection, many people only think about their own information – but in reality, they often disclose third-party data without obtaining their consent. For example, anyone who uses messenger services such as WhatsApp automatically transmits their entire phone book to Facebook/Meta, including the numbers of people who have never consented to this. This not only violates privacy, but also crosses legal boundaries. It becomes even more problematic when such data is linked to other sources: entire social networks can be reconstructed from contact lists, location data, and communication patterns. This creates a detailed picture of who is related to whom in what way—a treasure trove for advertisers, but also a potential tool for surveillance and abuse.
2. Harmless data can be used to draw powerful conclusions.
   Many people underestimate how much can be deduced from seemingly insignificant information. Individual data points may seem insignificant, but when combined, they paint an astonishingly accurate picture of your personality, your habits, your social environment, and even your political views. Modern analysis methods can identify patterns in your surfing behavior, location data, or shopping habits that you yourself are not aware of. What appears to be harmless advertising today can become the basis for discrimination, manipulation, or automated decisions tomorrow that you cannot explain.
3. Once data has been shared, it is almost impossible to retrieve it.
   A widespread misconception is that you can regain control of your data at any time. In reality, the opposite is true: as soon as information enters third-party systems, it is copied, passed on, analyzed, and stored in databases that you will never see. Even if a service offers to delete data, it remains unclear whether copies have already been passed on to third parties or continue to exist in backups. This loss of control is permanent—and that is precisely why it is so dangerous.

Data sovereignty only for professionals?

People who have recognized the value and importance of their data often face a problem: they want to protect their privacy, but are quickly overwhelmed by the technical hurdles involved. Not everyone has in-depth IT expertise, and few have the time to familiarize themselves with complex security concepts alongside their jobs, families, and everyday lives.

There are a number of excellent open-source projects that could enable true data sovereignty. However, these solutions are often so demanding in terms of installation, operation, and maintenance that they are virtually impossible for the average user to manage—for example, self-hosted cloud or backup systems. Other tools, on the other hand, are easy to use but only cover tiny areas of digital life, such as secure messengers or encrypted file transfers. This does not provide comprehensive protection.

What is needed now

Whenever you ask yourself how things can be organized properly, it is worth taking a look at nature and the systems found there, which have proven themselves over a long period of time. In nature, there is no centralized order, no omniscient hubs, and no dependence on individual actors. Instead, there is regional organization, distributed responsibility, and robust independence. Every creature remains sovereign—and it is precisely these principles that our digital world needs.

Strengthening your own devices: smartphone, laptop, or PC

Anyone who uses digital technology on a daily basis already owns powerful devices such as smartphones, laptops, or PCs. These devices are technically well suited for securely storing, managing, and searching personal data. Data should generally remain on your own devices and only leave them if this is explicitly desired and consciously permitted. This requires software that enables convenient, transparent, and local data processing—without hidden cloud leaks. The focus must be on the WHAT ("What do I want to do?") and not on the HOW ("How do I secure it technically?"). Good software relieves users of this complexity.

Peer-to-peer: Secure data transfer without detours

Nowadays, cloud services are usually used to access your own data from different devices or to simply transfer it between these devices. From a technical point of view, however, there is no reasonable reason to share private data with third parties just to make it available or to transfer it easily. Tools are needed that enable direct exchange between devices—without central servers, without silent readers, without dependency. Peer-to-peer technologies have been around for years, are mature, and are in productive use. They enable:

• Automatic localization of devices on the Internet
• End-to-end encrypted connections
• Direct exchange and synchronization
• Integration into existing software such as web browsers

These technologies show that secure, direct communication has long been possible. What is missing in the context of data sovereignty are applications that make it suitable for everyday use.

My answer to these challenges

This conviction led to the creation of memo. The software is not the next cloud-based app that forces its users into a provider's closed service ecosystem. It is a local platform that enhances existing devices and bundles their capabilities in a meaningful way. The platform deliberately integrates with existing file formats and working methods instead of introducing its own formats or data silos. Everything remains open, portable, and exportable at any time — without lock-in.

The app combines four areas that are inseparably linked in everyday digital life:

• Desktop search – to find information quickly without uploading it to external systems
• File management – to create order and keep data where it belongs: on your own devices
• Knowledge management – to organize thoughts, media data, and content in a structured way
• Peer-to-peer sharing & synchronization – to connect devices directly to each other, without central servers, without cloud dependency

The idea behind is simple: People don't need new data silos, but tools that connect their existing devices in a meaningful way. Tools that treat privacy not as an add-on option, but as a basic principle. Tools that are powerful without being complicated.

memo is a step in this direction. The software aims to show that digital sovereignty is not just a theoretical ideal, but can be put into practice – with technologies we already have and devices we already own.