Beyond Encryption to Privacy by Design

While many organisations had to make overnight or retrospective policy decisions about collaboration and communications tools in recent weeks, the platforms and tools themselves have also been ramping up their security parameters to meet the unexpected wave of new users with varying expectations and levels of expertise.

Inevitably the rush to remote created a tempting environment for hackers and cybercriminals, so the ability to have secure and compliant conversations as well as file and data access has shot to the top of many corporate agendas.

Security vs privacy

While encryption is now becoming the baseline, Vaporstream CEO, Galina Datskovsky, argues that this can create a false sense of assurance, due to a conflation of the concepts of security and privacy:

“WhatsApp offers end-to-end encryption in most countries, right?” She explained. “And people say, Oh, that’s a secure chat. But is it really private? Right? And the answer is, of course, it’s not. Because if you send me a WhatsApp message, although it was safe coming to me to my device, I could post it on Facebook and everybody could read it. And there’s nothing you could do about that. So it is certainly not private. Security and privacy are two very, very different things.

“Vaporstream was created with security and privacy by design from the beginning, to allow people to have truly private conversations, as well as being secure”

This message will self-destruct in…

By ensuring that messages disappear completely after a user-specified interval, Vaporstream messaging can be used in a range of scenarios, from confidential business conversations relating to HR issues or M+A negotiations, to healthcare, to a charitable project supporting vulnerable children — where the app empowers professionals to talk privately to children when they may still be in the home of an abuser, because the messages are completely deleted.

In enterprise use you may want the message securely removed from the user’s device but still archived, for compliance purposes, which takes place on the user’s servers according to their own policies and requirements for retention and disposition. Vaporstream does not keep any record of the messages, and can even route through or avoid specific locations for messaging in transit.

For example in healthcare and telemedicine, “It’s HIPAA information”, Datovsky continued, “so you don’t want it in the open. You want the information on the device coming just in time, you might be scanning a form and sending it into your organisation, but it’s all very private The patient record needs to be updated with a lot of that information, but the visiting practitioner doesn’t need that information after they left that visit, and the fact that it’s no longer on their device protects the patient.”

For the most senior level business conversations which once took place in the privacy of secure boardrooms, Vaporstream enables total privacy with zero recording or retention — which is important in a world where every conversation is now mediated electronically for the foreseeable future.

With support for video messaging on the roadmap for the next quarter, as well as a focus on A2P messaging for industrial locations, Vaporstream will be an important name to keep an eye on, as we adjust to the communications necessities of the ‘new normal’.