Today, I am predicting that before May 13th 2020, LinkedIn will have a feature that makes it possible for some Updates/Posts here to self-destruct. We are entering a new age on online privacy since Facebook tested UNSENT which makes it possible to retrieve (and delete) past messages in recipients’ accounts. Yahoo and Gmail will surely give us emails that self-destruct after say hours, days, weeks, months, and years.
As we move into this new territory, the implications will be massive for business contracts. Yes, you have agreed via email only for the emails to permanently disappear after say two months. And you cannot recover them. Simply, now is the time to think how to secure your business digital assets and plan ahead the kind of contracts you execute via electronic systems.
Personally, I am a tech guy but I am very suspicious of digital systems to preserve anything. I have this habit of printing things I want to preserve and secure. In 2009, I had written a book and the publisher sent me a PDF file to proof-read before publication. I did. When I woke up, the file had disappeared in my laptop. I was stunned on that possibility largely because the file I received was a simple PDF document [nothing esoteric]. Imagine if that was an important contract and your partner had withdrawn all elements to destroy it, magically.
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Before you think this is science fiction, Techcrunch reports that Gmail is testing that feature already. Yes, it is coming to Gmail possibly in weeks.
Based on those screenshots, expiring emails work pretty much like expiring emails in ProtonMail. After some time, the email becomes unreadable.
In the compose screen, there’s a tiny lock icon called “confidential mode”. It says that the recipient won’t be able to forward email content, copy and paste, download or print the email.
You can configure the expiration date so that your email disappears after 1 week, 1 month, multiple years, etc. You can also ask your recipient to confirm their identity with a passcode sent via text message. This sounds like a great way to associate email addresses with phone numbers and improve Google’s ads.
As I have noted, we will break the web because we want super-privacy. When you cannot trust that the email you have archived would be available when you need it [the other person wants the ability to control distribution] it means no one would use email for anything serious. I am happy we have trees in Nigeria. So, we would go back to papers. Yes, everyone will just ask for paper contracts as I am going to be suspicious agreeing on anything on emails when the emails have the possibilities to disappear.
Mark Zuckerberg poisoned the web when people woke up and saw that all messages he had sent them had disappeared. Essentially, he had proven why we should not take his platforms as credible ecosystems for something serious. You cannot make these things up – they are playing in real scenes all in the name of user privacy.
To recap, now six sources confirm that Facebook messages they had received from Mark Zuckerberg had disappeared from their inboxes. When we told Facebook we had an email receipt proving the retractions
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