Ephemeral Messaging Now Available for Businesses
February 3, 2014
Temporary content is tough to search. Naturally, that is part of the point for the disappearing photos at Snapchat, and now some companies are applying the concept to messaging. BloombergBusinessweek introduces one such firm in, “Confide, a Snapchat for the Corner Office.” The idea behind these apps is to protect delicate legal and personal information in businesses, but it occurs to me that there may be some state officials who wish such a system had been in place for their messages in, say, last August.
Writer Sarah Frier notes a big problem with Confide, just released on January eighth, and other such apps: they are likely to run afoul of regulations that require the preservation of business records. And the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority is not in the habit of letting violations slide; last December, that agency fined Barclays $3.75 million for failing to retain certain records, including emails and instant messages, over the past decade. The article reports:
“[Jon] Brod, Confide’s president, says it’s up to users to make sure they exercise proper caution and judgment. His app’s interface looks like an e-mail inbox, except that when you open a message, the text is covered by colored boxes that you have to run your fingers over to remove. Earlier words are quickly covered again, making the message more difficult to copy via screenshot than those on Snapchat. Confide’s additional security advantage, co-founder Lerman says, is end-to-end encryption, which means that the key needed to decrypt a message resides only on the recipient’s mobile device and is never transmitted over a company’s servers. That’s a step that would make government surveillance, or the Dec. 31 publication of millions of user phone numbers hacked from Snapchat, much more difficult to achieve. ‘We don’t have the technology to read your messages,’ says Lerman, who’s still running Yext. Because Confide doesn’t store any messages on its servers, it doesn’t have the ability to retrieve them if a company, or the National Security Agency, comes knocking.”
Interesting. Frier goes on to observe that Snapchat could make trouble for Confide if it decides to ramp up marketing to business users. We also don’t know whether businesses will embrace the tools at the risk of incurring fines down the road. I predict that some will steer clear, but others will find it worth the risk, especially if they have something to hide that would get them into more trouble than deleting records would. Ah, progress!
Cynthia Murrell, February 03, 2014
Sponsored by ArnoldIT.com, developer of Augmentext
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