Evernote Privacy and Security
April 15th, 2008
Security and privacy are extremely important topics for Evernote users, and for good reason. Evernote would like to provide a single service to manage your memories for many years. To achieve this, we must provide a very high level of system and data security while offering users a variety of choices to manage their own privacy requirements. Here is a high-level overview of some of the ways in which your data is protected by Evernote.
When you add a note to the service, it is secured like your email would be at a high-end email provider. This means that your notes are stored in a private, locked cage at a guarded data center that can only be accessed by a small number of Evernote operations personnel. Administrative maintenance on these servers can only be performed through secure, encrypted communications by the same set of people. All network access to these servers is similarly protected by a set of firewalls and hardened servers. Your login information is only transmitted to the servers in encrypted form over SSL, and your passwords are not directly stored on any of our systems.
We also offer enhanced privacy options that would not be available from services like email:
If you have sensitive text that you would like to remember (passwords, PINs, credit card numbers), you can encrypt that text in our Windows client (Mac coming soon) using a passphrase that is never transmitted to Evernote. This encrypted text can only be decrypted and read on one of your computers after you’ve re-entered the encryption passphrase. The sensitive text is not readable on our servers or on your computer by anyone who does not know the passphrase.
If you have some notes that you only want to access from a single computer, you can place these into a “Local Notebook” on our Windows or Mac client. Notes in a Local Notebook are never transmitted to our service, so they aren’t accessible from the web, or from your other computers. This may allow a greater level of privacy for some notes, at the expense of the accessibility and reliability you would get from a private note on the service.
Evernote recognizes that user choice is an important component of privacy and security. We believe that no single option is going to meet the needs of all users, so we aim to offer a set of tools that let people balance their needs for accessibility, privacy and control.
Posted by Dave Engberg at 5:22 pm in Uncategorized
Permalink |
Leave comment | Trackback |
Digg this | 
Save to del.icio.us
About the “Local Notebook” option:
This seems like a good choice but from what I understand, images have to be sent to the server for text in the image to be searchable. Is this going to continue to be a limitation of the “Local Notebook” or is this something that the company is working on?
April 15th, 2008 at 5:38 pm
The Windows desktop client includes local image processing capabilities, so you can process text in images in Local Notebooks on Windows.
The Mac client does not yet have local image recognition, so text in images on the Mac would not be recognized in Local Notebooks, although you could still organize and find these images through other features (tags, dates, contents, origin, etc.)
April 15th, 2008 at 5:53 pm
Off topic question: Any chance we’ll see Evernote for the Blackberry?
April 19th, 2008 at 9:07 am
Will be anxiously awaiting encryption for the mac client. I have been looking for a replacement for my current password protected spreadsheet system that feels very 1998.
April 19th, 2008 at 11:19 am
Shawn - Blackberry is currently supported via: mobile web browser + email in to Evernote (with image attachments). We plan to improve this via IMAP/POP3 support in the near term. Longer term, Blackberry is important to us, but software distribution for the Blackberry is a bit tricky due to carrier restrictions, etc.
Kevin - the build with text encryption is in QA right now, hope to release it late next week. I’ve been using the encryption on my MacBook for a couple of weeks, and I think you’ll like it.
Thanks
April 19th, 2008 at 11:28 am
Can I choose which notebooks are synced on your server. Some of my information is proprietary to my employer so I could not use the service for that. I would like to be able to segregate that and keep it local, while syncing my none proprietary information. Is this possible?
Thanks,
May 28th, 2008 at 7:55 am