Are ALL of my notes REALLY secured from Evernote employees?

[Mr Jumbo Guy 5]

Hi, I'm thinking to jump into Premium and I found that Evernote employees can access our notes from the backend but Evernote in their new policy in 2017 said that they WON'T anymore.

Article - https://thenextweb.com/apps/2016/12/15/evernote-employees-can-now-read-your-notes-heres-how-to-stop-them/

Now, I saw in Evernote's updated privacy policy where they say that they won't take a look at our notes. But I'm thinking that what if some of the employees can still access our notes from the backend? Who knows what anyone can do on the internet right?

I use Evernote for both my personal and business purpose and was thinking to jump into the premium subscription but that article, despite Evernote updating privacy policy, makes me cold feet.

My question why would they even access our notes in the first place? They are providing service and but have NO right to take a look at anyone's notes. That's the way I and everyone thinks.

I think they can anytime access our notes anytime without even letting us know.

Every good thing has to have a flaw. I like Evernote very much. I manually copied all of my notes from OneNote into Evernote. 

Anyway, I can FULLY secure my notes only to myself in Evernote? I only use one device and that's my laptop. I don't even use Evernote on my phone. Any way to COMPLETELY secure all my notebooks and notes and have peace of mind?

Thanks in advance!

 

[s2sailor 2,185]

6 minutes ago, Mr Jumbo Guy said:

Any way to COMPLETELY secure all my notebooks and notes and have peace of mind?

Only two ways that I know about.  Put anything that you are concerned about into local notebooks only.  They will stay resident on your laptop and will never get sync'd to the EN servers, but you are responsible for any backups and data recovery.  The second is to passwork protect, such as using a pdf attachment, anything sensitive that you want to store on Evernote.  Evernote also allows you to encrypt selected text within a note.  I use all three methods.  I operate under the assumption that anything placed on the cloud can, and may likely, get compromised at some point, so I encrypt what is important to me, or keep it off EN servers by storing in a local notebook.

[Mr Jumbo Guy 5]

3 minutes ago, s2sailor said:

Only two ways that I know about.  Put anything that you are concerned about into local notebooks only.  They will stay resident on your laptop and will never get sync'd to the EN servers, but you are responsible for any backups and data recovery.  The second is to passwork protect, such as using a pdf attachment, anything sensitive that you want to store on Evernote.  Evernote also allows you to encrypt selected text within a note.  I use all three methods.  I operate under the assumption that anything placed on the cloud can, and may likely, get compromised at some point, so I encrypt what is important to me, or keep it off EN servers by storing in a local notebook.

You mean writing everything in a pdf and password protecting it and then uploading the pdf to evernote?

And I have multiple notes to encrypt. Not texts, but I want to encrypt notes and notebooks. How to do?

[DTLow 5,736]

In answer to your original question, I know Evernote is accessing my notes.
- Images and pdf are ocr'd.  
- An index is created from each note's text; I use this to search my notes.

As for encryption, it depends on your device.

On my Mac, I can select text, right click and select Encrypt.
I can use the Preview app to encrypt pdfs.
Using Office/iWork apps, I can saved the document encrypted.

[s2sailor 2,185]

18 minutes ago, Mr Jumbo Guy said:

You mean writing everything in a pdf and password protecting it and then uploading the pdf to evernote?

And I have multiple notes to encrypt. Not texts, but I want to encrypt notes and notebooks. How to do?

What I suggested is on a note by note basis.  If your note is text only, then you can encrypt that note using EN's built in encryption.  For anything more complicated than that, I will create a pdf file, encrypt it and then attach it to a note within EN.  There is no current way to encrypt entire notebooks.  That has been a common request and so far EN has chosen not to implement it.

[Mr Jumbo Guy 5]

13 minutes ago, DTLow said:

In answer to your original question, I know Evernote is accessing my notes. Images and pdf are ocr'd.  An index is created which I use to search my notes.

As for encryption, it depends on your device.

On my Mac, I can select text, right click and select Encrypt.
I can use the Preview app to encrypt pdfs.
Using Office/iWork apps, I can saved the document encrypted.

4

What's "ocr'd"?

[rezecib 98]

15 minutes ago, Mr Jumbo Guy said:

What's "ocr'd"?

OCR = Optical Character Recognition. An image of text needs to be OCRd to be searchable, so Evernote automatically extracts text from these and indexes them so you can search them.

As for when/why notes would be accessed, the only case I know of where an employee would actually look directly at a note is during the tech support process, if there's some problem with a note and you give them permission to look at the problem note(s).

It was stressed a lot during my orientation that we want to protect your data. Access to it should only be done by machines, like those that are doing OCR, or indexing for search, etc.

But as s2sailor recommended, the best way to secure them is to attach an encrypted file. That way it is basically impossible for us to be able to access it (note that this also excludes its content from search, because our machines can't make any sense of it either).

[stocky2605 401]

if you‘re using only local notebooks on your computer - why using Evernote? on a Mac you can have folders with any kind of documents, Spotlight is indexing all your data for searching, use Tags and smart folders, maybe you need a solution for OCR your images, but that‘s it.

[Mr Jumbo Guy 5]

2 minutes ago, stocky2605 said:

if you‘re using only local notebooks on your computer - why using Evernote? on a Mac you can have folders with any kind of documents, Spotlight is indexing all your data for searching, use Tags and smart folders, maybe you need a solution for OCR your images, but that‘s it.

I'm using Windows. Any similar like u mentioned?

[s2sailor 2,185]

2 hours ago, stocky2605 said:

if you‘re using only local notebooks on your computer - why using Evernote?

The suggestion to use local notebooks was mine, not the OPs.  I suggested it as a way to keep sensitive information off the cloud.  Version 2 of Evernote was not cloud based, all content was local and it worked great .  I would say that 3/4 of my content today is in local notebooks.  If the ability to have local notebooks was removed then Evernote would become very limited for my use case.

[DTLow 5,736]

3 hours ago, stocky2605 said:

if you‘re using only local notebooks on your computer - why using Evernote? on a Mac you can have folders with any kind of documents, Spotlight is indexing all your data for searching, use Tags and smart folders, maybe you need a solution for OCR your images, but that‘s it.

Local Notebooks still provide an Evernote feature I value;  the note container.

• It contains the base note file (enml) plus any other other format files; images, PDFs, word processing, spreadsheets, ..
• Notes can be cross-linked.
• Tagging and searching is more functional within Evernote.

The Evernote editor is basic, but it does the job of editing the base note contents; local or sync'd.

My preference is to use sync'd notebooks; for the server backup and having access on all my devices.
I use encryption to protect my sensitive data.

[jasecutler 4]

On 6/19/2018 at 7:38 AM, s2sailor said:

The suggestion to use local notebooks was mine, not the OPs.  I suggested it as a way to keep sensitive information off the cloud.  Version 2 of Evernote was not cloud based, all content was local and it worked great .  I would say that 3/4 of my content today is in local notebooks.  If the ability to have local notebooks was removed then Evernote would become very limited for my use case.

Does having 'local notebooks' mean the size of your files are taken from your computer's harddrive as opposed to cloud storage? 

Another question I have is regarding 'encrypting selected text' - when I highlight a chunk of text from my Notes, the encryption is disabled. Why is that the case? The macro question is why can't we just encrypt a whole Note? 

 

[DTLow 5,736]

1 hour ago, jasecutler said:

Does having 'local notebooks' mean the size of your files are taken from your computer's harddrive as opposed to cloud storage? 

Yes.  The data for local notebooks is stored locally; there's no option for cloud storage.

Also for sync'd notebooks; Windows/Mac by default maintain a full copy of our data locally.  Windows does have an on demand feature. 

Instead of embedding files as attachments in a note, we can use a link.  This allows the file to be stored externally; a cloud drive is an option.

>>when I highlight a chunk of text from my Notes, the encryption is disabled. Why is that the case? The macro question is why can't we just encrypt a whole Note? 

Evernote supports a text encryption feature.  This is text only; no non-text characters.

[jefito 5,589]

4 hours ago, jasecutler said:

Does having 'local notebooks' mean the size of your files are taken from your computer's harddrive as opposed to cloud storage? 

https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/209005107-What-is-a-local-notebook-

4 hours ago, jasecutler said:

Another question I have is regarding 'encrypting selected text' - when I highlight a chunk of text from my Notes, the encryption is disabled. Why is that the case? The macro question is why can't we just encrypt a whole Note? 

https://help.evernote.com/hc/en-us/articles/209005547-How-to-encrypt-content-inside-Evernote

No real answer as to "why", except "just because"...