this post was submitted on 01 Jun 2025
17 points (87.0% liked)
Privacy
38448 readers
716 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Can't do that with email. Email doesn't have the necessary protocols to keep a file from being copied, scrub file systems, or maintain external links to trusted time keeping sources or control over the hardware to prevent screenshots or other methods to save the data as it's being displayed to the user.
There are some possible partial implementations like encrypting a file and only allowing decryption and display on a remote server. But then what's the point of making it an email in the first place? And if the method for viewing the data is something like a website, that doesn't prevent screenshots or other ways of storing the data.
The only way to truly have self-destructing content of any kind is to use a device that's fully controlled, a sever that makes sure the device is not compromised, and a neutral third party you trust to keep all recipients from tampering with the server and devices. Otherwise, if one of the users gets control of any component, they will be able to compromise the system. Unfortunately, there are no trustworthy companies who aren't under pressure to profit fr your data or from governments to allow access to your data. So there can never be a commercial product like that. And email doesn't have any of this as it's designed to be portable, not controllable.