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Comment by jimkleiber | Hacker News Reader

I built an app for micro journaling but then mostly stopped maintaining it because I was very afraid of the danger of other people hacking into it, especially if it became mainstream and high-value state targets used it.

For those of you who keep journals, how much do you worry someone will gain access to it?

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I do worry about this, but I also have two counterpoints when I think about it:

1. There are things which I write which are private, but if they were forcibly revealed then I would stand by my truth, including mistakes and things I'm ashamed of.

2. It's better to act as though you are in a free and decent society than to become your own policeman!

I try and remind myself that "they" are in the same position as well. I may feel some type of way about something written, but everyone's human, so do they've got something similar, I just don't know it exactly.

I appreciate this reminder, even just thinking about them having a similar dilemma can help me remember they may share similar fears.

Good points. I especially like #2. I also had this concern, but actually in the context of pen-and-paper vs digital journaling. I was worried that a physical notebook may more easily fall into the wrong hands than digital but in this day and age it might well be the opposite.

What really bothers me about society in the context of personal notes being made public is that I feel like we don't recognize that people can change their opinions on things. Writing can be a way of thinking through and playing with ideas and beliefs that one doesn't end up holding long term. But people are routinely judged harshly for things they wrote/said/tweeted years ago even if they no longer feel the same way. Or at least that's my cynical view.

I appreciate both of these points.

Maybe a more optimistic look is that if more people were that open publicly, then maybe we would judge less, recognize the uncertainty and ebb and flow of thoughts and feelings, and see ourselves and each other more humanely.

I appreciate these and have some follow up questions/comments.

1. What about when these things revealed may show that you broke the law, intentionally or even accidentally?

2. Amen. I've been reading more papers lately about the emotional burden of keeping secrets and not expressing ourselves and have been personally dancing with it for years. Thank you for saying this.

I wonder if my worry is not so much if people were to gain access to what I wrote in the journal, but by being the creator of the journal, someone gaining access to what someone else wrote and either the legal repercussions of that, or more likely, the physical and emotional ramifications of such.

I occasionally worry about things like that, but mainly because I sometimes write about ideas that I think some people would find very upsetting rather than because of possible legal issues as you mentioned in some other comments below. But in either case, one possible solution is to write about things metaphorically, such that you know what you're writing about, but anyone else would require some additional information to know what you actually mean.

Yeah, I thought of something similar in that one of the best ways to keep it safe would be to automatically inject similar yet different emotions and memories into the journal, on the idea that only I would know what I was talking about, then realized memory can be super faulty and the closer it is to being believable, the more I might actually believe the chaff.

I think what you suggest might work better, especially if it's just me, where I may remember the metaphors/inside jokes better, and from the perspective of developing the app, I don't know if that would alleviate the fear I feel for how others will use it.

Have you considered a more simple setup such as a local text file that is encrypted? Of course, there is always a risk but reducing the attack surface can help.

I designed it to be local-first (local-only on Android, iOS didn't let me turn off internet permissions) and using an on-device encrypted database with required password to login. I think it was as secure as I could have made it, but I think I still have the worry of not being able to protect against state-sponsored attacks, or others that can get root access on the phone and install keyloggers, etc.

While I understand those are rare occurrences, I also didn't necessarily want to become a target like Signal. But maybe I'm blowing this out of proportion because Apple and Google have an incentive to make sure their phones aren't rooted, so maybe it would be a lot safer than I imagine.

I guess I also worry about law enforcement getting devices (legally or illegally) and having access to such deep info. What we say to ourselves in a journal often can be a LOT more honest than what we say to others in text messages, emails, etc.

Any thoughts on this?

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