#dpd15

[ashperson]

Today, countries all over the world are recognizing Data Privacy Day — known as Data Protection Day in Europe. Take a tour of one of our data centers to see how we’re safeguarding your data. Learn more about protecting your privacy in the Google Safety Center: http://goo.gl/JBKqaY  #DPD15 #SafeOnline https://plus.google.com/110580234133841396976/posts/hsdcuoiwiqV

[blog-getunseen]

how-we-keep-our-users-unseen-2

By Alex North

  Few inventions have ever changed the course of daily life to the extent that the internet has, and will continue to do. As more and more of our everyday activities take place online, in order for the web to remain

open, transparent, and safe for everyone

, the rights and wellbeing of the public must also translate to the digital world.    Celebrated annually on January 28,

Data Privacy Day

is an international effort that aims to educate consumers about the way their personal information is digitally collected and shared, empowering the public to hold the products they use to high privacy standards. Given the amount of high profile hackings that have made headlines recently, the relevance of this campaign is potent. How many apps, websites, and devices do you use on a daily basis? What do they know about you? How securely do they store your information? What could leak if a hacker found a security vulnerability?  

  In our pursuit to offer our users a secure and anonymous platform, we’ve considered these questions carefully. There are a lot of products that claim to offer their users anonymity, but there is also a growing suspicion among the public that nothing on the web is truly anonymous. Some platforms may obscure your identity from other users, but still require that you give them your geolocation, Facebook credentials, or phone number in order to use the service. When faced with a subpoena, a hacker, or surveillance, the only platforms that are truly anonymous are the ones that never have any personal information to begin with.    So what do we mean when we say that Unseen is anonymous? We mean that we collect and store as little data about you and your device as possible. We don’t know who you are, and if you’re smart about it, we couldn’t find out even if we really wanted to. If complete and total anonymity appeals to you, the following information will help you understand what we collect so you can ensure that your identity is completely safe.   

What we collect:

  You don’t ever have to provide any personal information to use Unseen, but we need some data in order for you to have the same experience every time you open the app. We create and store a unique authentication token for your device, which allows you to have the same icon within a given thread, to access your notification history, and to communicate with other users over direct messaging.  

How we keep it safe:

  We don’t just take this information and store it on our servers where it could potentially be hacked, court ordered, or sold to advertisers. In order to keep you anonymous, Unseen encrypts your authentication token with a one-way hash. This gives us an internal value that we can use to provide you with a unified experience, but that is completely useless in terms of tracking it back to your device.   

What we never see:

    Every communication exchanged via

direct messaging is encrypted

and decrypted only at the device level. This means that the only two people with a key that can access a direct message are the sender and recipient. We at Unseen can’t read or see anything you send, and neither could anyone who broke into our server or intercepted a message in transit. As an extra layer of protection, all direct messages self-destruct after 24 hours.   

What this means for you: 

    No one could ever use your encrypted information to link your content back to your device, but the public feed is viewable by anyone who has downloaded Unseen

.

If you routinely post photos of your own face, or go around giving out your name, phone number, or social media handles in the comments, then you’re not really being anonymous. Leave enough identifying breadcrumbs on the public feed, and anyone viewing the feed may be able to guess who you are through context clues. If keeping your identity completely concealed is important to you, then you should refrain from posting any kind of identifying information to the public feeds. The most secure place to do that is over direct messaging.