‘Uncategorized’ Blog Posts

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.

Our friends at Give Away of the Day are running a 24-hour Evernote invitation giveaway-a-thon. Get yours before it’s too late.

Click here to get your invitation

I was really excited to see Matthew Miller’s post on ZDNet about the Evernote Mobile Web client. It always rewarding to see someone use something you’ve built. It’s especially cool when they appreciate some of the subtleties. The Evernote Mobile Web client was one of the first completed parts of the Evernote service. The web viewer, in conjunction with the ability to email notes and photos into your notebook, was designed as a lightweight Evernote client that could run anywhere.  When we were deciding on features for the mobile web we focused on fast loading pages that even the simplest mobile web browser could use, yet, at the same time, we wanted to illustrate the power of capturing and recalling your notes from anywhere.

A lot of the original development was done using the iPhone, HTC TyTN, Motorola RAZR, and the Opera Mini Browser. The application tries to figure out how advanced your phone is and enables features accordingly. Better phones gets thumbnails and more notes per page (as Matthew points out), the less-advanced phones get fewer notes per page with number pad shortcuts. If we don’t guess right, you can always re-configure each phone on the settings page. One other nice feature is that if you take a huge picture and access it via the mobile web, we’ll resize the pictures before we send it down to the phone, so it won’t take all day to open up a note. We also incorporated emailing functionality so notes could be emailed with just a few clicks.

For mobile web users who want to access their notes even when they are offline (say, on a plane), the IMAP gateway provides a solution. Phones with an email client that supports offline access, like iPhones and Windows Mobile devices, can connect and sync their notes down to their phone and get to them even when they don’t have network access. You don’t get highlighting, complex search tools or some of the other specialties of Evernote but it’s another great way to get to your information whenever you want.

Next on the list, we’re looking at more iPhone and Android-specific features. The browsers on the high powered devices are great and we want to make the most of them.

Here is a screenshot of what happens when you try to email a note from Evernote about what happens when you try to launch a major new web service.

We couldn’t have done it without ThinkGeek.

It’s Oscar Sunday and I felt like showing off…