What ephemeral messaging is good for

A few years ago, a friend of mine, Nico Sell (who runs the Defcon kids' programming track r00tz) asked me to join the advisory board for her startup, Wickr, which does "ephemeral messaging," a subject that is greatly in the news with Facebook's recent announcement of a new kind of "ephemeral messaging" option.

I was very skeptical when Nico asked me to join Wickr's advisory because I thought that it wouldn't work: if I don't trust you and I send you a message, even a disappearing message, you might screenshot it or just take a picture of it with a camera before it disappears.

But Nico set me straight: Wickr is for people who trust each other's good intention, but not each other's ability to perfectly remember to delete stuff after they're done with it. This is a real problem for lots of us: I always assume that when I cross a border that anything on my phone might be liable to search and seizure, and since I have people who send me stuff in confidence (journalistic sources and even just friends discussing personal matters) I always go through all the different messaging systems I use and delete that stuff in advance.

Ephemeral messaging systems relieve people of that burden. I sometimes realize -- after crossing a border -- that I forgot to delete my Twitter DMs or some other obscure kind of message on my phone. I would love it if all the services I used let me set a default delete-by date of, say, one week. Read the rest