Privly — Share Priv(ate).ly

In the ongoing era of human civilization, everybody is leading two lives. One is real and the other one as Digital life. We may not know it but every bit of our information is being sold for money to the third-party software. Every company like Facebook, Google and Twitter sells our information to make money. If we think about it, these information’s is used to predict the choice of people and how well the services will be used. Hence, these types of leaks provide a hole in the privacy as an individual.

Should we stop using these websites?

The thing that a normal person will think if he has to respect his privacy would be to completely isolate himself from these social addictive websites. But, this is not the ultimate and full-proof solution as we now have a large contact base of people connected to us virtually who helps us in many ways. Some may compromise as they see the above-mentioned point as an advantage. But what if I tell you that you can continue to use these social websites without the tension that someone may be selling your private information. Yes, it is possible with the help of open source project named PRIVLY which provides a solution to this known as Encryption.

What exactly does privly do?

Privly allows you take complete control over the content that you share on any website not including to Facebook, twitter and Google providing you complete privacy and security. Shifting your data or trust from an organization is not going to help us in long run, can’t even protect it. Eventually, the government, hacker or a rogue employee will find a way and then expose everything you wrote anywhere. Privly enables people to trust any storage provider by taking away their ability to read your content. The Privly extensions encrypt your data before you send it to a server for storage. Encrypting your data means the server only sees a scrambled version of your content. This way, you can store your data anywhere without losing your privacy.

In more simpler sense, you know that any type of data that any website stores from you will always be stored in the database. Although it is correct that there is a different type of databases. So, whenever you will write the content in the textbox of the website, a link will be generated and that link will be sent to the server instead of the text. So now companies have a link in their database and they cannot sell the database of links, since links does not contain any effective information.

When you send any message to your friend, that message is encrypted and converted into a link and sent to the database. That link is sent to the receiver where that link is already decoded by the privly. So, if the receiver will have the extension, then the message will appear otherwise a link will be sent to the receiver. Upon clicking on the link, receiver can view the content of the message.

Besides, privly provides with the option of self-destructing the message in a particular interval of time.

So, where does these message goes?

These messages go to the server that are hosted by you. If you want, you can host your content on your hardware by maintaining it like a web server. But since most people won’t take the trouble, Privly offers its own secure hosting solution PrivlyAlpha.

So, you get the idea, that Privly gives you the ability to share/post/tweet/chat anywhere without giving the host site content. It also gives you power to grant or revoke access to your content to anyone and anywhere and giving the content creator ownership of their data. Also, Privly Host do not use or sell or distribute your data to the third party.

How do I contribute in it?

To contribute you need to understand what Privly does. After removing the unique features of any website, we are left with data — chats, email and photos. Privly uses the data indifference to create the notion of “Injectable Applications”. which are full web applications that are injected into the context of another web application. Since these applications are scoped to data and not layout, their properties are simplified and usable across the web.

Privly works within browser extensions by scanning web pages for specially formatted hyperlinks. When the extension detects the hyperlink, it ``injects’’ the link into an iframe that is served locally from the browser extension. Since the injected application is a full web application, the app could potentially support any web-implementable feature.

So, in order to contribute to Privly, you need to go through the documentation here and then connect with them via IRC on Freenode.

IF you need any help from the documentation, you can ask me at piyushmact18@gmail.com.

Also, I will be uploading a separate blog on the technical stuff of Privly soon.