I learned about an interesting project the other day. It is work being done at the University of Washington (the state) in their computing department. There is a free download available if you want to experiment with what they have so far.
In order for email to get to the addressee even if there are equipment failures, most email is copied by the transmitting systems and kept for a while. I have read that it can be for 90 days or more, maybe a year. During that time, everything you sent and received has been copied. Lawyers are increasingly aware of this as is, of course, the government. They are aware that they can subpoena records and make use of them. Not to mention other governments whose computer workers may find their way to the servers holding my files and read what I have sent out. I doubt they are interested but you never know, do you? I have read that Cardinal Richelieu, the nemesis of the 3 musketeers, said that if any man would write just three lines on paper, the Cardinal would be able to find an interpretation of the writing that would result in the man being hung! I'm not worried but maybe later.
The U of W project is Vanish and it makes electronic data with an expiration date on it, at which time, it VANISHES. According to the bit of explanation I read on the website, it will not matter if the text is archived or cached, it will still self-destruct. They say it will be unreadable. If your computer gets mauled badly, experts can still recover much of all of what was on the hard disk, probably for a hefty fee. I suppose at least initially these computer science students have taken that into consideration. Eventually, somebody will probably invent “Un-vanish” that will recover the data.
As they say at their website, their project makes email perform like a phone call in some ways. We talk on the phone and exchange important information but we have to remember it unless it is recorded somehow. I actually don’t have much that I think should vanish but I plan to try the system out. I am writing on the afternoon of Saturday, July 25, and I expect to send this post out on the morning of Monday, July 27, about 6:30 AM. Unless I want to put more time into learning Vanish, it is easiest to accept the default value of 8-9 hours, after which the text vanishes or scrambles badly. So, about 7 AM, I will send a sample email that should become permanently unreadable about 3 PM that day.
