Blindsend v1.0. For your blind spots.
I was having lunch with a friend — she is a lawyer in a top-ranked global law firm — when she brought up an unusual question. She has heard that when she sends an e-mail to a client, this e-mail can be read by somebody else, and she wanted to run it by me, a computer science PhD degree holder.
When I confirmed, she was shocked and when I explained to her how e-mail protocols and TLS worked, she said “So when I send an e-mail to my client, it is potentially seen by someone else. It is not confidential.” Mind. Blown.
At first, I was surprised that people didn’t know that already. It is always our blind spots that the attacks and breaches happen. After some discussion, we realized that lawyers have known the e-mail was not to be trusted. Too often, we just don’t have the courage to look at what lies in our blind spots. Somewhere, deep in our minds, we know how dependent we are on information technology, and we so strongly want to believe that it will deliver its promise, that we choose not to look.
A year ago, we made blindsend: an open-source tool for end-to-end encrypted file transfers. A step in the right direction. Hundreds of developers downloaded it, and countless files were sent. Over the past year we spoke with dozens of people who were brave enough to look for their blind spots. We spoke with lawyers, bankers, VC funds, financial services firms. All of them said that they reverted to e-mail to send confidential documents to their clients, but also to receive sensitive personal KYC documents from them.
They all said the same things:
- E-mail is unbeatable
- The tools available to them to securely exchange messages and files were too complicated to use, so they simply often bypassed them, and just used e-mail (or similar conventional channel);
- Most of such tools were only meant for communication within their organization or with administration, but not with their clients;
2. The lack of ease of use is a key factor of change-resistance
- If logging-in or creating an account somewhere was a condition for their clients to interact with them securely, the clients wouldn’t cooperate and they would still need to revert to e-mail exchanges.
We worked on blindsend to improve its usability and make it more self-explanatory. You can exchange files in an end-to-end encrypted way, with no user-account needed at all, and still keep using e-mail to exchange blindsend file links. Magic.
We’re now confident enough to put blindsend in the hands of any user (maybe even our mothers), so we call the version a 1.0. Try it out on blindsend.io!
We’d love to know how you’re using the tool, and the service being anonymous we don’t have a clue. So please do reach back at hello@blindnet.io. We’d love to hear your story.
If you want to make your software private like blindsend, read here about our data minimization tool.
