It may not be long before you’re using Wickr as a verb, as in, “Would you please wickr your message?” Wickr is an encryption app that lets the sender control those who can see the message, for how long & from where.
That’s right, your message will go up in smoke at a pre-set time. Of course, it’s not exactly like it happens in the movie, Mission Impossible, but the net result is the same – any picture, video & text message you send will self-destruct when the preset timer runs out.
The service & app are free to use unless you require certain premium features such as group messages or sending large files.
The privacy aspect is also zealously guarded. Your communications are virtually untrackable & secure from prying eyes since the app uses sophisticated military-grade encryption algorithms that are implemented for mobile device platforms. It works across all kinds of communications, creating a seamless mobile messaging environment that is entirely anonymous & private.
Signing up takes less than a minute, & it’s a lot easier than signing up for an email account. Users can send secure & private text & voice messages, pictures, videos & pdf files anonymously & set the messages & files to self-destruct after a specified time elapses. You can even send files from your Dropbox or Google Drive.
They don’t ask you for any personal information, & they don’t collect any information about what you do. Their server doesn’t store any unencrypted data, & they’ll delete all the meta-data on your messages including time & date stamps, device type & geo-location data.
This deletion is not just a simple delete like you hitting the delete button. If you do that, someone who’s skilled at data recovery can still reconstruct the message or files using the meta-data. When you delete the message, wipe out the meta-data & overwrite it with random bytes, there’s no way left to bring the data back.
These guys are so confident about the security features that Wickr has offered to pay $100,000 under a bounty program to anyone who finds a bug or vulnerability that impacts the confidentiality or integrity of Wickr users’ data.
So why does Wickr offer such extreme encryption, anonymity & paranoid shredding options? Well, they certainly have the tin-foil hat market cornered. But these are not your typical latte-sipping civil rights activists or libertarians protesting big-brother intrusion. On the contrary, 3 of the 4 co-founders – Kara Lynn Coppa, Christopher Howell & Nico Sell – are a forensics expert, a former defense contractor & a security expert, respectively.
Their motto is simple & can’t really be faulted – “The Internet is forever. Your private communications don´t need to be.”
Of course, they also have a privacy expert as one of the co-founders. That would be Wickr CTO Dr. Robert Statica, who’s the director of the New Jersey Institute of Technology’s Center for Information Protection.
On their website, the Wickr founders claim private communications to be a universal human right, & say that their app supports the First Amendment under the U.S. Constitution, & Article 12 of the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
The Wickr app is available for both iOS & android phone users.
Click here to download Wickr on Android.
Click here to download Wickr on iOS.
Image Credit: Wickr/Google Play/Apple iTunes
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