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Many products and services have made reference or offered services to hide
their identity, guarantee the safe message delivery and have even created
self-destruct email.
Is this good Netiquette? it is an interesting question. There is a hint of
deceptiveness being a reason for utilizing these methods.
But, in light of the lack of Internet security combined with eroding privacy
lead me to conclude this is acceptable when done for good purposes.
Notwithstanding, there are now more of these products than ever. Below is a
good article referencing these. I will leave it to you, the reader, to make
your own conclusion. Whatever you do, it remains an interesting topic.
Good Netiquette to all! This blog will not self-destruct!
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This Email Will Self-Destruct In
Five Seconds
A raft
of new companies aim to deliver the dream of the secure, easy-to-use and
ephemeral email.
By Kevin Lincoln -
fastcompany.com
In early
September, Bruce Levenson, owner of the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks, announced that he
would sell the team after self-reporting a racist email he had sent in 2012.
The
Hawks are valued at over $400 million. That’s a strong tribute to the power of
the written word.
Wouldn’t
be nice if, in classic Mission Impossible fashion, emails could actually
self-destruct?
Or take
the case of the missent email. This past July, a Goldman Sachs employee accidentally
typed “gmail” instead of “gs” into address bar and sent confidential
information to a Gmail random account. The brokerage house then sued to have
that email deleted, which Google said it would only do with a court order.
It seems
fair that a racist email from a powerful sports figure should be disclosed or
maybe even that misspent emails stay where they land. But after Snowden’s
revelations, it also seems likely that even innocent text communications can be
stored and sifted. Wouldn’t be nice if, in classic Mission Impossible
fashion, emails could actually self-destruct?
A
handful of companies are trying to fleeting email a reality.
Normal
email accounts—Gmail, Yahoo!, etc.—can’t add this feature because of the way Simple
Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) works. (In 2009, Gmail debuted an “undo send”
feature but it doesn’t actually yank email back—it just adds five seconds
before it sends.) To create truly disposable messaging, you need to build it
from the ground up. “We decided we wanted to make crypto that people would use
100 times a day, and crypto that exceeds the NSA’s top-secret encryption
technology,” says Nico Sell, the CEO of a company called Wickr.
Sell is
a DefCon vet and white-hat hacker notorious for her secrecy—she refuses to be
photographed on camera without sunglasses, which mess with facial-recognition
software, and most details of her life are a mystery, from where she lives to
the names of her husband and daughters to whether her “Nico Sell” is even her
real name. She founded Wickr in 2011 after 10 years of trying
to get other companies to use her encryption technology. Now, she provides an
app that uses “seamless key management” to allow the anonymous sending and
receiving of messages that are timed to self-destruct and, because they are
stored exclusively on devices, cannot be accessed from a cloud or server.
“Wickr
is processing millions of messages a day, which is more top-secret messages
than the Internet has ever seen,” she says. “Which is really great too, because
a lot of what we’re doing is working with human rights activists, and you’ve
got tons of great cover traffic—I’m pushing people to encrypt as much as they
can, it helps to control the surveillance state and give power to the people.”
Matching
her background, Sell’s rhetoric and behavior is couched in the philosophies of
activists—she famously refused to allow the FBI a backdoor into Wickr. But she
also believes that Wickr is the best messaging app, period, and she sees
Facebook, Skype, Whatsapp, and Snapchat as its competition. Eventually, the
company will move beyond even that: Sell wants to use Wickr’s tech to
facilitate financial-industry and peer-to-peer transactions securely and
secretly. With a business model built on these trades, as well as premium
content and licensing, Wickr also has no need for ads, which means no need for
any user data.
While
Wickr might be the most ambitious and well-known of the secure messaging apps,
it’s far from the only one. Telegram, an Android-only app that originated out
of Russia, is a fast-growing service that also provides encryption and
self-destruct options, though, unlike Wickr’s, those features aren’t always
activated. And Gliph
combines messaging with completely secure bitcoin payments, making it an
attractive service for a certain kind of user—the kind that cares enough to use
bitcoin.
If you delete a message in Gliph,
it will delete it on the other side as well. It’s a complete deletion, no
backup.
Gliph
allows users to send messages across platforms, including the web browser and
desktops. This flexibility comes with a caveat—instead of local encryption,
like Wickr and Telegram, Gliph uses server-side encryption—but founder and CEO
Rob Banagale believes that the trade-off is more than worth it in terms of
improving the user experience.
“We host
the conversations, so you can lose your phone and still pick up the
conversation on the web and on somebody else’s phone by logging in,” Banagale
says. “Another key aspect of what we have is you can delete messages. If you
delete a message in Gliph, it will delete it on the other side as well. It’s a
complete deletion, no backup.”
Like
Wickr, Gliph is ad-free, and it protects user details via messaging as well as
a service called cloaked email, which hides email addresses behind a pseudonym.
Regardless of which app you opt for—and there are others—their rise is both a
reaction to current events as well as a curious harbinger of what’s to come in
communication. Sell says that Wickr is a tool, and like all tools, it can be
used by both good people and bad people. But in her eyes, that doesn’t change
the need for the tool itself.
“We
believe in power to the people,” Sell says. “We really think that no matter the
frontier, if we can get freedom of communications and freedom of information to
everyone around the world, then we can have significant change, in a good way.”
It also
means that, if Levenson’s email had
self-destructed, he’d still be the owner of the Hawks. Or maybe the next time
an intern decides to accidentally reply instead of forward an email—maybe the
whole office won't get it.
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