Evernote Employees Can Read Your Notes | Hacker News Reader

Evernote Employees Can Read Your Notes

lifehacker.com

92 pointsonewhonknocks27 comments

I'm seeing a lot of people talking about wanting to switch to something else, and that something else usually takes the form of "{name of another private corporation} Notes App". How much longer are we going to continue playing this game?

I'm working on an open protocol that standardizes the encryption and ownership of notes.

See https://standardnotes.org

Would love any feedback/help. If you'd like to contribute, send me a message.

this is great! I like the ruby implementation.

I stopped working on an app in this space because encryption wasn't up to snuff; but I also needed to use powerful search, and could not figure out how to merge the two conceptually.

I would love to create software that people can use, and have absolutely nothing to do with their data; i just don't know how that's feasible when meshed with other technologies.

I think clients are plenty powerful to do their own searching. Server should store encrypted data, client should decrypt and manipulate the data as desired by the user.

Shoot me a message if you'd like to help out. me@bitar.io

If clients can pick from servers to store, or use something decentralized similiar to https://storj.io , even better. Thank you for working on this.

This reminded me of this post.

"...companies don’t get killed by competition, they usually find creative ways to commit suicide."

https://www.zoho.com/general/blog/companies-don-t-get-killed...

Evernote let their CEO and some key people go, then we have seen significant price increases and now this privacy episode. 'creative ways to commit suicide' indeed.

Disclosure: We compete with Evernote.

What is your product?

Notebook http://zoho.com/notebook

Evernote has been shooting itself in it's foot.

First restriction on being able to sync data to only two devices and now this privacy policy.

useful thread for note taking app recommendation:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13064215

my recommendations:

http://www.zim-wiki.org/

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/scrapbook-x/

zim-wiki isn't bad, but it has some serious cross-platform issues that make it a no go for me. I copy and paste things from the web in linux that Windows can't read. Instead of just saying 'we won't show you this note', the whole program refuses to open. Then I have to engage in a witchhunt because the logs are useless for tracking down which characters need to be changed and which files contain them.

I'm just saying... I want to love zim-wiki, but it's hard to love it when it stabs me in the eye.

If your notes are not encrypted then obviously some employees will be able to read your notes. This just states when employees will be able to officially read your notes. Any potential problems come from what they might officially do with your information. The allowed uses listed in the privacy policy don't sound much different than those found in most privacy policies I have seen.

Creepy. It's pretty common to see companies use https://fullstory.com/, http://www.inspectlet.com/ or other session-capturing tools now - and they wouldn't say anything in the privacy policy.

"If you’re worried about the content of your notes falling under the eyes of an employee or through a government request, you can always encrypt them..." Don't be fooled: unless you can specify your own key and your un-backdoored encryption algorithm this feature is worthless.

I don't get it - they could ALWAYS read your notes ("if We need to do so for troubleshooting purposes;" said the old T&Cs). The only thing they added is the new machine learning thing, from which you can opt out. And you can encrypt your notes (but I haven't used it so I don't know how useful their encryption is).

What is everyone going to do, move over to a Microsoft product? Oh yeah, because THEY are definitively to be trusted. I mean it's not as if they've put backdoors in their OSes or anything.

I don't see it as a great change TBH. You must always assume that they WILL read your stuff (and if not them, hackers will do). If you really want to protect something create an encrypted disk image and store that on Dropbox or the like.

I've been using the Quiver app recently. And so far I love it. You can sync it using Dropbox or whatever cloud service you want.

http://happenapps.com

What keeps me from moving to another note software is the right-click "save this web page to evernote" extension that I've come to rely on (for online purchase receipts, bill paying, etc).

Why don't you try ScrapBook addon of Firefox? You can sync data between all your devices using cloud of your choice as your data is saved in the specified folder.

It has option to export to epub or chm or pdf, in a case if you need it to read it in mobile device.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScrapBook

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/scrapbook-x/

I have been long user of it and find it very help to take web clippings or notes in web browser.

I'm a diehard Chrome convert for years now and won't go back to Firefox...

I'm curious as to why. Firefox has made a lot of improvements and is now much better than chrome when it comes to memory usage.

Memory usage isn't a concern; all of my boxes have at least 16G if not more.

What made me move away from FF (especially on OSX/x86) is being able to sit there and watch it redraw its own window decorations/"chrome". Adding a few extensions/plugins just made it slower.

I've got it installed (and updated) on all of my machines "just in case" I run into a site that's broken with Chrome or Safari, but I still have no desire to switch back to it for full-time use.

This just in: The Cloud is just someone else's computer.

Great message after I abandoned Evernote with their ludicrous sync fees.

I've very much enjoyed Bear.

Evernote? I don't think about you at all.

Bear uses CloudKit, so your privacy is subject to Apple's private keys instead of Evernote's. Is that a significant difference?

There are significant differences in the two companies and how they approach privacy, so yes.

You can opt out by unchecking "Allow Evernote to use business data to improve my experience”. I love hypocritical euphemisms companies use to get to your data.

Apparently, that doesn't help with employees being able to read your notes:

https://twitter.com/AdronBuske/status/808775903841046528

I would love to use org-mode for all my notes, but a lack of web-based editor that I would be able to use on the go makes it less convenient. Maybe worth doing as a personal project.

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