huridocs-tech 'Self-destruct' e-mail offers virtual privacy

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## author     : aviseu@oise.utoronto.ca
## date       : 09.10.99
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By Elizabeth Weise, USA TODAY
http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/review/crg441.htm

'Self-destruct' e-mail offers virtual privacy

Conventional Internet wisdom says e-mail is forever, copied
and stored on the sender's and recipient's PCs and any
number of computers it passed through on the way.

That might change soon. Disappearing Inc., a small start-up
firm in San Francisco, has devised e-mail that
self-destructs, Mission: Impossible style.

"The idea that you can send a message and have it evaporate
downstream gets at a lot of the problems with e-mail," says
Kerry Stackpole of the Electronic Messaging Association, a
trade group. "I can't imagine people wouldn't use it."

Currently, even if both sender and recipient delete a
message, copies remain on computers they can't get to. As
much as 85% of the evidence in the Iran-contra hearings came
from restored e-mail. And Microsoft has been burned by
internal messages introduced as evidence in its antitrust
case.

"Backed-up e-mail has been a boon to us," says Joan Feldman
of e-mail recovery firm Computer Forensics.

Disappearing Inc.'s system, due early next year, offers a
way to "shred" e-mail and turn it into "the transient
communication tool people think it is," CEO Maclen Marvit
says.

Say Alice is sending a message to Bob. When she hits the
send key, a small add-on filter to her e-mail program goes
out across the Net and notifies the Disappearing Inc. site.

The site assigns her message an identifying number and gives
her a software "key" with which to scramble it. When Bob
opens the message,  the same key from Disappearing Inc.
unscrambles it.

What makes that e-mail temporary: Alice can say she wants
the key to exist for as short as a few seconds or decades.
When time is up, the key is deleted from Disappearing Inc.

It's legal, co-founder Dave Marvit says. "If the feds are
knocking on your door and you start shredding, that's
destruction of evidence. But it's accepted business practice
to regularly destroy documents."

Says Feldman, "Disappearing Inc. is going to be a great boon
to companies trying to reduce their (legal) exposure."

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'Self-destruct' E-Mail Offers Virtual Privacy
http://www.usatoday.com/life/cyber/tech/review/crg441.htm

'Self-destructing' E-mail Developed (AP)
http://www.nytimes.com/library/tech/99/10/biztech/articles/08email.html
[Registration required.]

Disappearing Inc. Keeps E-Mail Messages Private
http://www.sfchronicle.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/1999/
10/0
8/BU72497.DTL





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