Read Only option for Evernote

[onatbas 10]

Hi everyone,

 

A couple years ago this post was published in feature requests, asking from evernote for "readonly" notes, because it's so easy to erase note content by mistake.

I created this simple webapp to enable marking notes readonly, and lock them, this is already 2 years old and has many users, but I realized I never shared it here, so here you go, in case anybody is interested. You may read about it here: http://onat.me/readonlymaker 

 

Best,
Onat

 

 

[JohnLongney 83]

@onatbas

with all due respect and very much appreciating the kind thought but I certainly would never authenticate any script hosted by GoDaddy on an insecure website, registered in Turkey.

Nothing personal, just a general concern.

[onatbas 10]

5 hours ago, JohnLongney said:

@onatbas

with all due respect and very much appreciating the kind thought but I certainly would never authenticate any script hosted by GoDaddy on an insecure website, registered in Turkey.

Nothing personal, just a general concern.

 But the website is just like that because it's on github pages. the actual webserver is on google cloud (http://35.244.210.159/auth/evernote) which is located us-central, you don't go through auth process on my domain, ever. Also keep in mind that the authentication happens in evernote https connection. Also the code is available here: https://github.com/onatbas/evernote-readonly . I understand your concern, hopefully that's some clarity for you there. I did this because I love evernote, and I use it myself,  also a lot of my clients asked about this so I wanted to assist. I'm an evernote certified consultant, (https://evernote.com/certified-consultants) and part of my job is to interact with evernote users all the time. 

Best,
Onat

 

[PinkElephant 8,077]

Clearly addons  can create more value to a application. And each one needs some access to perform its wonders.

However, this means as well that they receive rights that sometimes reach deeply into the security of the data contained.

Readonlytagger receives autorisation to

• ...
• List notes (= list the note titles, and the embedding structure of notebooks and stacks)
• Load Notes (= access to all content of any note, be it text, pictures, appends etc.)

For me, this goes way to deep into the security of my data. What do I get in exchange ? Some comfort, maybe sometimes the avoidance of a punctual loss of data when deleted unintentionally. If I realize it right after the action, I can always use the „undo“ function to restore what I had deleted.

Anybody can decide this for him-/herself. For me this addon is a No-Go !

@onatbas Hello Onat, this is by no means meant to be a personal mistrust against you or your application. I respect your effort to help on this issue. It is just a very basic question concerning data security. Because EN needs access to all data to create the search database - we all love this feature - it is necessarily „open“ on the inside - the more important is the outer protection. And a breach is a breach ...

If we want the lock feature, we should reopen the request note and vote-vote-vote it to the top. If EN wants to go this far, it could be done by creating a versioning of notes, which would allow a „deep“ go-back-structure behind every note in the EN database.

[DTLow 5,736]

6 hours ago, PinkElephant said:

If EN wants to go this far, it could be done by creating a versioning of notes, which would allow a „deep“ go-back-structure behind every note in the EN database.

Read-Only doesn't require a complicated update for Evernote.  
It's a change to the UI; the editing off/on is already implemented, we just need control of the switch.

The Evernote database is already set up for read-only notes.  This is how these add-on apps are implementing their feature.

[JohnLongney 83]

@DTLow

Nice to learn what Evernote is withholding its users. I do not even want to know how easy or difficult implementation would be. The chance of Evernote cocking it up  is a very likely scenario. 

However, as the topic is about granting third-party access to one's data I would say "do not ignore Google warnings" in such matters.