Vanish

I recently read an article about a new plug-in for Firefox call Vanish, which can be used to encrypt as well as destruct sensitive emails.  Vanish gives anyone who has access to the data an 8 hour window before the message is permanently destroyed.

From Vanish’s own website, ‘after that timer expires, nobody can read that web content — not the user, not Google, not Facebook, not a hacker who breaks into the cloud service, and not even someone who obtains a warrant for that data. That data — regardless of where stored or archived prior to the timeout — simply self-destructs and becomes permanently unreadable.’

I thought this sounded interesting and decided I would give it a try.  I downloaded the program and the plug-in and got started. Since Vanish only works on web programs, such as Facebook, Gmail, Hotmail etc, I tried it through my Anduro webmail.

Here is my original message:

Then I select the entire message and right-click to create a Vanish message:

Vanish creates an encrypted message that can only be read by pasting this message into a de-coding window at the main Vanish site:

However to my dismay, once I pasted the encrypted data into the Vanish site i recived this error message:

I tried a few different times in a few different ways and yet I was not able to decode my message.  So that was the end of my experiment.

However, we don’t need a working version of this software to debate it’s merits.  I do know that in my day to day correspondence I constantly rely on my saved communications.  Without access to archieved emails I’ve sent  or received I would have big problems with both clients and the Anduro team.

However, Vanish would be helpful if we are sending a client’s credit card to the production team (we currently phone the credit card numbers over).

Of course, Gmail has the retrieve function on their emails if one happens to send an emotionally charged email. With Vanish’s service though, one has to encrypt the message before it’s sent and then recipient has to paste the data into the decoder – so Vanish is not helpful after one sends a regrettable email.

So what are the practical uses for a program like Vanish?  In my reading of some posts on this matter there may be some legal and acedemic usses for this tool.  Here are links to some further reading on this matter:

http://www.boingboing.net/2009/07/22/vanish-self-destruct.html#comments
http://www.scientificblogging.com/news_articles/vanish_article_will_selfdestruct_5_4_3_2