Your phone has a message app. This is the place to send messages, photos and other files to another person, no matter where they are. It’s also the place that you can leave important privacy notes for your contacts. But how do you know it’s the right one?
My first instinct was to look at the name of the app and see if I could find anything about it on Google. Unfortunately, most apps have generic names like “Message” or “Messenger” so I couldn’t really get any useful information out of that.
So then I tried looking at the description that came up when I looked at the app in my phone’s settings menu. That turned out to be very helpful. It said something like this:
“A messaging app with an emphasis on privacy.”
I knew immediately what I wanted. I downloaded the app and started checking it out.
The first thing I noticed about the app was that there were two sections: Messages and Privacy Notes. There was nothing else. No Contacts, no Settings. If you’re wondering why I’d want a simple, minimalistic app, remember that I’m writing this article from my phone while sitting in a coffee shop.
Let’s talk about Messages first. When you open the app, you’ll see a list of people who are currently available to chat. You can either tap the contact’s name to start chatting with them or you can swipe left to view their photo (if you have it), which is nice because it’s a good way to figure out whether or not you’re actually talking to the person whose name you tapped before you start typing.
You can use a few different ways to initiate communication between users. One is by tapping Send Message. Then you enter a subject and text into two separate fields. You can choose to attach a file as well. Once you hit Send, the recipient will receive a notification in the form of a pop-up bubble telling them that you’re sending a message. This is handy because sometimes you might want to keep your conversation private without having to type out an entire email. And since you don’t have to worry about formatting, it’s much easier than typing long emails.
When you’ve finished chatting, you can simply tap Done to end the conversation.
The next section of the app is called Privacy Notes. In order to access it, you need to click Edit at the top of the screen. From here you can add as many notes as you want. Each note can contain all sorts of information, including contact info, reminders, links, images, videos, audio clips, and even GPS location coordinates.
This feature is especially handy if you need to add some privacy restrictions to certain conversations. For example, say you’re talking to someone online and he mentions his work address or his home address. You might want to prevent him from knowing exactly where you live. Or perhaps you don’t trust that person enough to give him full access to your GPS coordinates.
To add a note, just tap Add Note. You can search through previously added notes by clicking Search. You can also delete a note by pressing Delete at the bottom right corner of the screen.
There’s only one problem with this feature though. There’s no way to edit existing messages once they’ve been sent. So if you make a mistake and accidentally send a message with the wrong information, you’re stuck with it.
And unfortunately, there’s no way around that fact. While the app does allow you to delete old messages, the only option available to you is to delete the entire conversation.
It’s easy to imagine why this would be annoying. You probably wouldn’t want to lose the whole conversation because of an error. But at least the sender has the option to change the message at any time.
The person who is planning to use the Privnote must be clear in the mindset that they have the right to send the message to other users at any time. Even the security attached with eth message is more as the data than the attached password. The people who will have the password can only have the access to it and that to 1 time.
Overall, I think this app is pretty cool. What it lacks in features, however, it makes up for in simplicity. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t offer any other functions except for chats. If all you want to do is send short texts, maybe it’s worth downloading this app. But otherwise, I recommend using a more traditional messaging app instead.
If you do decide to download this app, make sure to check out our guide to privacy apps. We’ve got you covered!
