What the world needs now

The last couple of years has shown the world what some of us have known all the time – internet services like Dropbox, Gmail and Facebook are vulnerable. Facebook was made as a series of quick and dirty hacks without any thought of privacy or security, and Gmail was build on a reasonably secure platform. Dropbox used an encryption scheme for the stored data. None of them provide enough security to be used for important personal or business information.

Dropbox shows us that encryption managed by the site is only as strong as the least trustworthy employee. Gmail shows us that there are many ways to penetrate a shell defence, and once you are on the inside the lack of encryption makes information harvesting trivial. Facebook shows us that security cannot be added on to an insecure system, it must be designed in from the beginning.

What we need, then, is a service built on sound principles from the ground up. It is a tough job, and the team that makes it must follow some quite rigid (and sometimes boring) methods. It is also a challenge to make it sufficiently user friendly.

To have a system reasonably safe against both spying and data mining, the users must have strong encryption software. This has existed since PGP was launched, but has been too difficult for most users to get right. A scheme for a “social” website needs to have a lot of flexibility. It is not enough to encrypt things that only can be read by a certain receiver, you also need to make postings and messages that can be read by groups or all users. The reason why even public forum articles and the like should be encrypted, is that this will prevent data mining. Only real people with an account should be able to read from the site.