Stealth Text… Self Destruct
StealthText has released an SMS technology that can self-destruct like in an old Mission Impossible movies. They argued that this technology can be used to protect privacy and sensitive data from leaking to the undeserved people. They also argued that this technology is completely harmless because you can only command the system to add this technology to a specific text message that you wanted to self-destruct.
I haven’t looked into the technology of this service (well, largely because it’s propietary and the technical information is hardly available for the masses). You can read more on this technology on Red Herring. I’m not going on the details of its technology but on the social impact of it. I’m quite inconvenient with the service available.
I’m a strong supporter of free information and online collaboration (not specifically using internet, text messaging also included) and found that this new technology doesn’t improve our way of life. Sure, you can ensure that sensitive information that you just send will be secure knowing that the recipient can’t save it to his/her handphone. But to think about it, why do you send that sensitive data in the first place. That’s either you’re darn stupid or clueless.
With this one-read-destroy technology, you are vulnerable to disrespect your recipient as someone who’s untrustable to hold the information that you send. This is of course dangerous on the business realm where trust is everything and the lack of respect can backfire to you that gave you less credibility.
All in all, this new technology is a great technology, probably it’s the first step to a completely self-destruct email. But to be implemented on a text messaging context, it’s too far fetched and in the end, renders the technology useless because of its inability to help make life easier.
