The Burn Note Blog

[burnnote-blog]

Burn Note Contest Announcement

People tell us about interesting uses for Burn Note all the time. Some of these stories are so good we decided to have a contest to see who can come up with the best one. To enter, tell us about a situation where using Burn Note would have helped. This could be something real or made-up, contemporary or historical. Entries will be judged on creativity, humor and uniqueness. The first place winner gets a $25 Amazon gift card, runner up gets a $15 Amazon gift card. Deadline for entries is Friday May 24th at 5PM EST. You can submit multiple entries. Some of the best entries will be shared on Twitter, Facebook and other places. Note that by submitting you are agreeing to allow us to publish your entry. Submit your entry using this form.

May the best (creatively enhanced) Burn Note win!

-the Burn Note team

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Announcing the Burn Note App

Since January 2012 Burn Note has provided senders more control over the privacy and security of their messages. User feedback has shown us that Burn Note is also great for having private conversations, however a website is not the most convenient means of delivering this functionality. In order to meet this need we are pleased to announce the release of the Burn Note app on iPhone, iPad and Android devices. The Burn Note app uses our patent-pending Spotlight display method that makes messages copy-resistant and prevents snooping by people who are physically near the recipient's phone. In addition to using Spotlight all messages on the Burn Note app and website are automatically deleted by a timer once the recipient opens them. The Burn Note app is seamlessly integrated with our website so you can use either depending on your preference. Burn Note can be used to send messages to other Burn Note users, to email addresses, or senders can get a link to use anywhere. Recipients do not need to register to view and reply. The Burn Note app is now available. Get it in the iTunes Store and Google Play Store. We'd love your feedback! -The Burn Note Team

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Privacy Policy Updates: Why you hate them, why you'll love ours

Changes to website Privacy Policies are typically viewed with cynicism by users who have had to endure more and more of their personal information being grabbed by web companies. This is unfortunate as the Privacy Policy is the most important part of documenting how our personal information is used by the companies we do business with and transparency is critical in this area. The danger of cynicism is that it breaks down this core process by which the internal working of web sites are communicated to the users who choose to give their information to them. Privacy Policies should be updated regularly to explain a site's operations as accurately as possible to its users. The reason Privacy Policy changes tend to be in the direction of taking more of your personal information is because most major websites are free and rely on other sources of revenue instead of you paying them. The personal information you give them and the time you spend viewing their content are the closest thing to a payment in the transaction by which they provide you access to their site. As the businesses which operate these sites seek to increase revenue they tend to do so by scaling up the amount of personal information they collect from you and increasing the number of ways they make money from it. Thus, the user unhappiness at seeing a Privacy Policy update add new terms is similar to the unhappiness of seeing the price go up on an item you buy regularly. Unfortunately, these types of changes are likely to continue happening as a natural result of the businesses behind these sites pursuing additional revenue through their existing business models. At Burn Note our number one priority is maintaining the privacy and security of your messages. We plan to avoid the inherent conflict between increasing revenue and user privacy by pursuing a business model based on premium services. We expect to publish Privacy Policy updates routinely in order to keep a high level of transparency which we believe is essential to maintaining user trust in our service. However we want to ensure that the overall level of privacy Burn Note provides for your personal information does not "drift" over the course of these updates. As part of avoiding privacy policy "drift", today's Privacy Policy update consists of the removal of an item and another item replacing it. When you send a Burn Note we are no longer recording an individual event which includes an anonymized value derived from your account id. Instead we maintain a weekly total count of messages sent and conversations created by your account. These new total counts are only retained for 7 days. Before they expire we use them to generate system-wide totals which are retained. While other sites integrate with 3rd party analytics packages that record nearly all user actions on the site, Burn Note continues to adhere to a policy of not sharing users' personally identifiable information with any third party vendors for analytics or advertising purposes. We are proud of this as it is a rare feature in a web site today. Our updated analytics system automatically expires all account-specific information once we have compiled our weekly site-wide totals. These site-wide totals are a necessary insights into weekly user activity so that we can understand if the changes we make are improving the site. View the full privacy policy here: https://burnnote.com/privacy   You can also see the previous version here. If you have questions or feedback please reach us via the methods on our about page. -The Burn Note Team

[burnnote-blog]

You Have Options

We love feedback.

When we launched the updated Burn Note in December 2012 one of the most frequent pieces of feedback we got from users was that they wanted the options back that existed in the previous version. So as of today we are happy to announce that these options are available again. Manual Deletion Timers: You can manually set the time the recipient has to read your note by opening the Options section. If you are inside a conversation click the gear icon to the left of the message composition area. If you are creating a new conversation click the Options button underneath the message composition area. If you don't set the timer manually then the timer length is chosen automatically based on the length of your message. Plaintext Messages: Sometimes it's useful to give the recipient a plaintext note which they can copy. For example if you are sending a long password which you want the recipient to copy & paste or if you are sending a link which you want them to click. In order to do this, open the options section and uncheck the box labelled "Prevent message from being copied". The message will still have a cover but when the recipient clicks it they will see the full message in plaintext. If you include any urls that begin with http://, https://, or ftp:// in your message they will be turned into clickable links. Conversation Passwords: Conversation passwords are useful if you are sending a message to someone who is not a member of Burn Note and you want to add an extra layer of security to prevent it from being opened by the wrong person. The recipient will need to enter the password before they can enter the conversation.  Add a password by clicking the "Add Password" button in the options section when creating a new conversation or in the conversation settings section of an existing conversation. Note that you will need to communicate the password to the recipient outside of Burn Note. We hope adding these options makes Burn Note more useful for you. Thanks for all the feedback, keep it coming! The Burn Note Team

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New Version of Burn Note Launched

We are proud to announce the public release of a brand new updated version of Burn Note. Your contacts have automatically been carried over into the new version. Any unread Burn Notes can be accessed at burnnote.com/previous_version.

Our new version makes it easier to have ongoing conversations with your contacts and lets you use nicknames to keep track of them. Furthermore, this new version of our website is optimized to run beautifully on iPhone, Android and tablet web browsers and is fully functional on older versions of Windows Explorer (version 7 and up). Burn Note has been completely rewritten to fix and improve on the initial release.

We want to hear your feedback about the new version of Burn Note. Since our service is focused on your privacy we do not have detailed information about how people are using Burn Note. So you need to help us figure out what you like and don't like about our new version.

To send us feedback email [email protected]. If you would prefer to give feedback anonymously we have set up an anonymous feedback form at https://burnnote.com/anonymous_feedback where you can send feedback without leaving any identifying information. The anonymous feedback form simply sends an email into [email protected].

We hope this new release makes Burn Note even more useful for you, check it out now!

—The Burn Note team

[burnnote-blog]

Discours Privés Avec Burn Note

Chers amis de Burn Note,

Nous sommes heureux de vous annoncer la sortie officielle d'une nouvelle version de Burn Note. Vos contacts ont été transférés automatiquement vers la nouvelle version. Vos Burn Notes non lues pourraient être vus au burnnote.com/previous_version.

Avec cette nouvelle version de Burn Note, il est facile de poursuivre vos conversations avec vos contacts et vous pouvez désormais utiliser des pseudos, pour plus de confort.

Cette nouvelle version du site est optimisée pour iPhone, Android et les tablettes, et fonctionne toujours avec les anciennes versions de Windows Explorer (version 7 et versions ultérieures). Grâce à ce nouveau Burn Note, profitez d’une version entièrement réécrite et évoluée.

Nous aimerions recueillir vos impressions sur le nouveau Burn Note. Comme nous sommes soucieux de la vie privée de nos utilisateurs, nous ne recueillons aucune information personnelle concernant la manière dont vous utilisez Burn Note. Aidez-nous donc à identifier ce qui vous plaît et ne vous plaît pas dans cette nouvelle version.

Pour partager vos impressions, envoyez un courriel à [email protected]. Si vous préférez rester anonyme, visitez https://burnnote.com/anonymous_feedback , où vous pourrez laisser vos commentaires sans collecte de données nominatives.

En espérant que la nouvelle version de Burn Note vous soit plus utile que jamais,

l’Équipe de Burn Note

[burnnote-blog]

New avenues for feedback

At Burn Note we put your privacy first. We never use invasive site-analytics that track the contents of your messages. This means we don't have many in-depth statistics about site usage the way other sites do.

So we're asking you to help guide us by giving feedback. What do you like about Burn Note? What do you not like? Are there ways it could be more useful to you?

We've created the address [email protected] to collect feedback from our users and help us improve the site. Please help us make Burn Note better for you by taking a minute to send us feedback. It will be much appreciated.