Regarding Privacy and Security

[Guddu 0]

Hi, I am about to use Evernote for my personal and work. And I have some queries:

1) How secure and private are my confidential notes in Evernote?

2) Can any Evernote employee access and see my confidential notes? I know people can see my notes and things only if I give access to them but here I am talking about Evernote employees.

3) Is there any way to prevent Evernote from auto-saving into the cloud and make Evernote to save the notes on my PC?

Thanks in advance.

Guddu

[DTLow 5,736]

27 minutes ago, Guddu said:

1) Is there any way to prevent Evernote from auto-saving into the cloud and make Evernote to save the notes on my PC?

Evernote has two types of notebooks; default and Local
The Local notebook is not uploaded to the cloud; there is no "auto-saving".  Users are advised to backup their data

>>2) Can any Evernote employee access and see my confidential notes? 

Evernote has procedures in place to ensure employees are not accessing our data
However, you should be aware that Evernote does have access for OCR processing and search indexing
I protect my sensitive data using encryption

>>1) How secure and private are my confidential notes in Evernote?

Completely secure if you encrypt them.  I trust Evernote's security measures, but my notes are still viewable on my Win/Mac device

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,959]

1 hour ago, Guddu said:

3) Is there any way to prevent Evernote from auto-saving into the cloud and make Evernote to save the notes on my PC?

As @DTLow said, you can make local notebooks whose notes are stored only on the computer on which they are created. But that also defeats a major purpose for Evernote, to be able to create and access notes on multiple devices. If I were going to make notes that I never wanted to appear on any other device, unless I copied them on a flash drive, I'd use some other program. I would use Evernote for notes I wanted to access easily on other devices.

[Guddu 0]

46 minutes ago, DTLow said:

Evernote has two types of notebooks; default and Local
The Local notebook is not uploaded to the cloud; there is no "auto-saving".  Users are advised to backup their data

>>2) Can any Evernote employee access and see my confidential notes? 

Evernote has procedures in place to ensure employees are not accessing our data
However, you should be aware that Evernote does have access for OCR processing and search indexing
I protect my sensitive data using encryption

>>1) How secure and private are my confidential notes in Evernote?

Completely secure if you encrypt them.  I trust Evernote's security measures, but my notes are still viewable on my Win/Mac device

2

Thanks for replying @DTLowWhen you said encryption, how would you advise me to encrypt my data? What is the way? 
And what do you mean by search indexing?
And regarding OCR processing of my personal and business data notes and such, any way to not let evernote access my notes as you said they do have access for OCR processing?
And after encryption, my notes are completely secure right?

6 minutes ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

As @DTLow said, you can make local notebooks whose notes are stored only on the computer on which they are created. But that also defeats a major purpose for Evernote, to be able to create and access notes on multiple devices. If I were going to make notes that I never wanted to appear on any other device, unless I copied them on a flash drive, I'd use some other program. I would use Evernote for notes I wanted to access easily on other devices.

Thanks @Dave-in-Decatur and I 90% of the time use my pc for my notes and such. I rarely use my phone to note anything. So only pc and mobile for me.

1

 

[DTLow 5,736]

48 minutes ago, Guddu said:

how would you advise me to encrypt my data? What is the way? 

Evernote has a text encryption feature
On my Mac, I highlight the text, right-click and select Encrypt Text

I also use encrypted attachments; pdfs and office/iwork documents
This is native encryption built-into the external apps

>>And what do you mean by search indexing?

You can access your data on the servers via the web platform (www.evernote.com) and search for text using the search box.  To speed up this search, Evernote has built an index of every word in your notes

>>any way to not let evernote access my notes as you said they do have access for OCR processing?

Encryption, Local Notebooks

>>And after encryption, my notes are completely secure right?

I believe so.  Use a strong encryption process; Evernote uses AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) with a 128 bit key

[CalS 5,280]

59 minutes ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

If I were going to make notes that I never wanted to appear on any other device, unless I copied them on a flash drive, I'd use some other program. I would use Evernote for notes I wanted to access easily on other devices.

Except, perhaps, for notes of a confidential nature one only wants to use at their Desktop while availing themselves of the EN search engine?  Local notebooks work well for this.

[Guddu 0]

23 minutes ago, DTLow said:

Evernote has a text encryption feature
On my Mac, I highlight the text, right-click and select Encrypt Text

I also use encrypted attachments; pdfs and office/iwork documents
This is native encryption built-into the external apps

>>And what do you mean by search indexing?

You can access your data on the servers via the web platform (www.evernote.com) and search for text using the search box.  To speed up this search, Evernote has built an index of every word in your notes

>>any way to not let evernote access my notes as you said they do have access for OCR processing?

Encryption, Local Notebooks

>>And after encryption, my notes are completely secure right?

I believe so.  Use a strong encryption process; Evernote uses AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) with a 128 bit key

A noobish question on the search index thing, only if I search, it will show the topics and texts of my notes and it won't show if any random people use the search engine to find notes? Moreover, no random people can search notes via the search engine, right?
And I heard 256-bit encryption is by far the strongest. Any external way to encrypt as Evernote has only 128-bit encryption facility?

14 minutes ago, CalS said:

Except, perhaps, for notes of a confidential nature one only wants to use at their Desktop while availing themselves of the EN search engine?  Local notebooks work well for this.
Correct. I am mostly infront of my PC. I rarely think and do work while I am on the move. So encrypted local notebooks is the best for me.

2

 

[DTLow 5,736]

19 minutes ago, Guddu said:

it won't show if any random people use the search engine to find notes? Moreover, no random people can search notes via the search engine, right?

The search is only external to Evernote.  There is no access by search engines like Google

>>I heard 256-bit encryption is by far the strongest.

I heard an explanation that went.  The chances of anyone breaking 128-bit Encryption is close to zero.  If you want to get closer to zero, use 256-bit or higher

[CalS 5,280]

16 minutes ago, Guddu said:

So encrypted local notebooks is the best for me.

You don't necessarily need to encrypt notes in local notebooks, unless you are concerned about someone getting access to your PC.  And remember, any text that is encrypted will not be searchable.

[Guddu 0]

44 minutes ago, DTLow said:

The search is only external to Evernote.  There is no access by search engines like Google

>>I heard 256-bit encryption is by far the strongest.

I heard an explanation that went.  The chances of anyone breaking 128-bit Encryption is close to zero.  If you want to get closer to zero, use 256-bit or higher

Thanks for clearing all of my doubts
I was gonna get trello but I came to know that support employees can anytime become administrators and access my notes without my permission. Just got confirmed of that. Also they DONT have local notebook saving option.
 

39 minutes ago, CalS said:

You don't necessarily need to encrypt notes in local notebooks, unless you are concerned about someone getting access to your PC.  And remember, any text that is encrypted will not be searchable.

Alright, thanks

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,959]

2 hours ago, CalS said:

Except, perhaps, for notes of a confidential nature one only wants to use at their Desktop while availing themselves of the EN search engine?  Local notebooks work well for this.

Yes, well, assuming one finds the Evernote search engine useful. I haven't had problems just looking for single whole words, but substrings and special characters seem to make it less than optimal for many people. I've got way better tools for keeping notes on my local computer and doing sophisticated searches.

[DTLow 5,736]

18 minutes ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

I've got way better tools for keeping notes on my local computer and doing sophisticated searches.

Please share?

I'm more into using tags for organization, but do sometimes fall back on text searches.  I agree the indexing could be improved

[CalS 5,280]

3 hours ago, Guddu said:

Alright, thanks

You are welcome.

[CalS 5,280]

2 hours ago, Dave-in-Decatur said:

Yes, well, assuming one finds the Evernote search engine useful. I haven't had problems just looking for single whole words, but substrings and special characters seem to make it less than optimal for many people. I've got way better tools for keeping notes on my local computer and doing sophisticated searches.

Horses for courses I suppose.  I just like dumping everything into Evernote and adding minimal tags to facilitate culling.  Then either a tag search or tag/text search gets me what I want in short order.  And it is all in one place.  YMMV.

[jefito 5,589]

22 hours ago, Guddu said:

Hi, I am about to use Evernote for my personal and work. And I have some queries:

1) How secure and private are my confidential notes in Evernote?

2) Can any Evernote employee access and see my confidential notes? I know people can see my notes and things only if I give access to them but here I am talking about Evernote employees.

3) Is there any way to prevent Evernote from auto-saving into the cloud and make Evernote to save the notes on my PC?

Thanks in advance.

Guddu

Evernote security overview: https://evernote.com/security Evernote privacy policy: https://evernote.com/privacy/policy

[Dave-in-Decatur 3,959]

23 hours ago, DTLow said:

Please share?

I'm more into using tags for organization, but do sometimes fall back on text searches.  I agree the indexing could be improved

This really won't be very relevant to the thread, since my work needs are entirely different from those of @Guddu as described here. But if I really want to create notes that are exquisitely searchable, and don't need to be accessible from my phone or a browser, I do so in my word processor/research suite, Nota Bene.

This has nothing to do with confidentiality or fitness or not of Evernote for a particular purpose. I had said, "If I were going to make notes that I never wanted to appear on any other device, unless I copied them on a flash drive, I'd use some other program."@CalS responded:

Quote

Except, perhaps, for notes of a confidential nature one only wants to use at their Desktop while availing themselves of the EN search engine?

And I noted that not everyone thinks highly of the Evernote search engine, and that I had better tools for creating searchable local notes. Nota Bene has an entire module devoted to searching text documents (for plain text or for labels = tags), from brief notes to lengthy papers to PDFs. Overall, though, it's intended for researchers, academics, and writers (there are some lawyers who love it too), so that it is a much more specialized tool than Evernote.

 

[mbuck 0]

Did the ability to create local notebooks get removed from Evernote?  I have been using them for years.  Now, when I go to File->New Notebook, It only gives me the option to create "Private" or "Shared".  If I create a private notebook, then in my list of notebooks, all my other local notebooks are clearly marked as "Local on your Mac", but my newly created notebook is not marked as such.  I refuse to use Evernote if I can't have local notebooks.

[DTLow 5,736]

37 minutes ago, mbuck said:

Did the ability to create local notebooks get removed from Evernote?  I have been using them for years.  Now, when I go to File->New Notebook,

Evernote still has the Local Notebook feaure on the Win/Mac platforms; documentation at https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/209005107-What-is-a-local-notebook-

On my Mac, I hold down the option key, then File > Local Notebook

Make sure you back up your notebooks.  By definition, they are not backed up by Evernote