Concerned that someone might be hacking into your voice mail or text messages? Small businesses would be more than happy to help.
A wave of startups are rushing to market with software and gadgets designed to keep email, calls and texts safe from hackers, government snoops, identity thieves and anyone else who might be trying to access users’ private information. Many of these tools have been used in corporate or government settings in the past, but small companies are in the lead in bringing the technology to the public.
They’re offering Web browsers that don’t save data about your searches, and services that keep email and text messages from being read by snoopers before they reach their destination.
Under lock and key
For the most part, they’re flying under the radar in the tech world, compiling relatively modest user numbers compared with giants like Google or Facebook. But entrepreneurs and experts say the fact that these firms are small may give them more freedom to act on consumer demand. “This is often the case with innovation,” says Heidi Shey, a senior analyst in security and risk with Forrester Research in Cambridge, Mass. “We see the small companies and startups take chances and innovate, because they are trying to carve out a niche and/or have a new idea.”
Many of the latest offerings rely on encryption, which allows a message or other information to be encoded in a way that only those with an electronic key or password can access it. Companies like ProtonMail and Lockbin offer encrypted email, which makes it virtually impossible for anyone to read it except the sender and the recipient. Wickr and other companies offer encrypted text messages. Private.me offers a search engine that doesn’t store user data.
Some offer more-complex services. Confide, a New York-based startup, not only encrypts messages but also permanently deletes them from the company’s servers and the recipient’s phone once they’re read. Photos and documents can also be sent this way. The free service will even notify users if someone tries to take a screenshot of their text.
“What you say—the spoken word—disappears after you speak it,” says Confide co-founder and President Jon Brod. “But what you communicate online remains forever, archived in the Internet’s permanent, digital record.…We think this is crazy.”
Burner, a San Francisco-based startup, gives users alternative phone numbers they can give out to people instead of their real number. When somebody calls the Burner number, the call is redirected to the user’s real number without revealing it. When users are done with the Burner numbers, they can take them out of service.
Big opportunities
Why are small companies leading the charge? Although some big companies offer privacy tools, some entrepreneurs argue it isn’t profitable now for big players to make a major push into the field. “If Facebook releases an app and it gets 100,000 users, that is a major failure,” says Robert Neivert, COO of Private.me. “If a startup does, it is a great success. Privacy products are mostly too small a market for big players, at least right now. So the bigger players are waiting to see if the market grows big enough in terms of revenue for them to target.”
For Daniela Perdomo, co-founder and CEO of New York-based goTenna, startups have an edge because they’re not beholden to vested interests as many large corporations are. “Although a startup like ours doesn’t have the ubiquity of the Goliaths, as Davids not only can we act according to our ideals, we’re also more likely to earn consumers’ trust on this issue and hopefully edge corporate tech in the right direction,” says Ms. Perdomo, whose company sells a device that lets users trade encrypted text messages with other goTenna users.
Yet small companies can easily lose customer confidence.
“New companies that are trying to break into the market sometimes employ aggressive marketing tactics that overpromise what the company’s technology can do in terms of security,” says Andrea Matwyshyn, a security and privacy expert and law professor at Princeton University. She adds that this can happen at larger companies, too, when departments don’t effectively coordinate.
Ms. Shey agrees that small businesses often make mistakes with presenting offerings to the public. She has seen small companies make vague, extravagant claims or, on the other hand, load marketing with technical details and not explain why the product is useful. “In both cases, it doesn’t present the company or its solution in the best light,” she says. “Big companies can fall into those traps as well, but I see it happen less often.”
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