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Encryption - Everything and Everywhere?


Traveller

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Hi,

I've seen other post about encryption or more importantly the lack of encryption in Evernote.

But I've not seen any response from Evernote in those posts... perhaps I just missed them, perhaps they don't bother to comment here.

 

And yes - you can encrypt some text in a note.

 

But ...

The list of 'hacks' occurring is getting longer everyday and using unencrypted solutions is starting to seem foolish.

I have been using Evernote since 2009, it is my brain backup and I'm feeling a bit vulnerable.

 

I'm nearing a point where I need to decide to stay with Evernote or find a more secure solution.

I truly love using the product, it is part of my daily routine and it is where I store everything.

Which is exactly why the lack of complete system wide encryption is becoming really concerning.

 

Yes it is hard.

Yes I would pay more money for it above what I pay for my premium account.

 

Based on some of the technical details I've gleaned about Evernote, my guess is that full system encryption would be a search performance hit at a minimum.

Got it, tough technical problems.

 

But what I need is a company/product that is solving these tough technical problems and has the ability to project when they will have solutions in the market that I can use.

Or I need to start thinking very prudently about finding another product that is solving these hard problems.

 

So ... to anyone who may be in the know ...

Where is Evernote at with encryption? 

When is full system, every bit of my data going to be as safe as they can reasonably make it? (all data fully encrypted in transmission and encrypted at rest wherever rest may be).

What does the product road map look like?

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They are (in)famous for not sharing their roadmap. If I were you I'd make any decision based on what you know now and not on something that may or may not happen in the future.

Given Evernote's current encryption and security my own view is that it is not suitable for anything that I wouldn't email to someone else.

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They are (in)famous for not sharing their roadmap. If I were you I'd make any decision based on what you know now and not on something that may or may not happen in the future.

Given Evernote's current encryption and security my own view is that it is not suitable for anything that I wouldn't email to someone else.

And, email is not secure, as Sony employees have recently reminded us with their bitter experience.

Before you hit the send button on any message (or, in Evernote, before you create any note) ask yourself if you would be comfortable if everything you wrote and attached were CC'd to everyone you know. Self-censorship, I'm afraid, is the way to go, unless you are using encrypted email. There isn't much use in worrying about Evernote's security if you are not using wise practices everywhere else. It's not so much that Evernote is insecure -- it is actually relatively secure for such a service -- but that the entire industry in the cloud lacks sufficient safeguards like automatic encryption for everything. SpiderOak and a few other cloud services are rare exceptions.

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The other piece of this that is important to me is that I have lots of things that I keep in Evernote for which I require no security whatsoever. I do think it's important to choose the right tool for the job and have never bought into the concept that Evernote can replace everything else and become some amazing repository for my life.

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Yeah. I think that is the most important thing. Enjoy the hype, because Evernote and others have some pretty exciting ideas, but recognize the strengths and weaknesses of cloud services, and use them appropriately. For example, most of the stuff I produce and the stuff I use in my workplace is inappropriate for an unencrypted cloud environment. Web clippings and other less personal / sensitive stuff seems appropriate for my use case.

I'm always a little uncomfortable when I hear folks putting passwords, tax data, and health records into Evernote or any other unencrypted cloud service, especially if they have someone else's data (family members, clients, patients, etc.). Even basic contact information about patients that a professional service provider stores, for instance, can be quite revealing: the fact that a person is visiting a mental health specialist, fertility clinic, or family lawyer gets sucked up, passed around among these nebulous data brokers, and becomes a valuable data point in the so-called mosaics. Once the data is let loose, it is out there forever. We tin-foil-hat-wearing loonies are starting to look like we underestimated the threats :(

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In the beginning I was probably a bit naively wooed by a single tool that I can use for storage, search, etc.  As the lack of security and privacy has become so abundantly clear across so many providers over the last few years; I’ve moved most of my content in to much more robustly secure services.

 

Evernote is the outlier … because I’ve not found another product that does quite what it does.

 

But, security and privacy are now trumping convenience, and probably should have always …. But …

 

Thanks for the insight … still hoping Evernote would speak up.

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