Email by James Bond

I first read about Privnote last week on ReadWriteWeb. This service allows you to send messages that self destruct after the link to the message has been clicked and the message has been read.

Ah, self destruction: it reminds me of the old Mission:Impossible series when the reel to reel tape player (this was before cassettes, my young readers,) burst into flames upon playing the details of the latest seemingly insurmountable challenge.

OK, so it's not actually an email that bursts into Flash-animated flames after reading. Though I think I remember something like that just before the dot bomb. Rather, your message is stored in a safe environment and the link to it no longer connects to anything after the first play -- after it is clicked once.






Privnote is a project of Insophia, a Uruguayan technology firm focused on Python and Unix/open source development.

My first reaction to this was...is there a need? I am a person that reads and stores EVERYTHING I get via email. So I talked to a contrarian friend who told me that there is a great need for this service in that there are times when you want to communicate with just one person, without fear of that info being passed on. That there are a lot of decisions and discussions that truly need to be 100% private. I will definitely accept that. And then I realized how I had gotten around the email storage issue indirectly. I never communicate privileged conversations and decisions by email, but rather by phone. Which has its straights and roundabouts (more roundabouts than straights,) and the idea of a truly secure way of carrying on a written discussion or taking a private decisions suddenly grew on me a lot. Also, communicating highly personal info would be a heckuvalot safer this way.

Their site explains it thus:

Have you ever wanted to send some highly confidential information (like credit card information or root passwords) over the Internet and were afraid others could be sniffing your traffic?. Well, I have, all the time. I’ve always being paranoid about this, so that’s why we, at Insophia, came up with Privnote, a tool for sending private notes over the net in a very easy and secure way.

There's a lively technical discussion going on on co-founder, Director, and CTO Pablo Hoffman's blog about Privnote, the gist of which is that this is a highly secure system. At least I think that is the gist...but as Barbie says, "math is hard."

So next time you want to have such a conversation, try Privnote. And I think it makes sense to keep an eye out for what these folks develop in Montevideo. Clean, simple, useful, practical. It's the future of our medium, after all. Best of all, it's free for the using.

Cute name and logo, BTW. ;-)

Thanks for reading, and don't forget to write.