NetCell@Org

Communicate Online With Extra Privacy

While sites such as Twitter and Facebook make it so easy to communicate with groups of friends or colleagues online, there's also a serious privacy issue. Mainly, the lack of it. It's easy to search through the entire posting history of any user, or merely to check the directory to see if that user has an account on the system at all.

A relatively new system called Cloaklet aims to change that. It promises total privacy. All of your messages are encrypted, and the only person that can read them is the person you send them to.

If you need to communicate securely online, perhaps with friends or maybe with some business colleagues, Cloaklet (www.cloaklet.com) offers a simple solution. Signup is free, as is the basic account that lets you communicate with a limited group of people. With premium accounts costing $20 a month, though, this is clearly being aimed more at the business community.

The problem remains, though, of just whether we can trust the people behind Cloaklet. How do we know they're not secretly spying on all the messages? Frankly, we don't. That's the nature of the internet, and of any system except one that you have written and installed yourself. To help allay fears, Cloaklet have published their source code online, and actively invites people to check it for security holes. As to whether the published version is the one their servers are actually running, though, that's a different matter. But at least it guarantees a more private environment, unlike the totally open Twitter system.