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Like Snapchat for e-mail
By adamg on Wed, 04/02/2014 - 6:43am
The Crimson reports two Harvard Law students have set up a startup that lets users send out self-destructing e-mail:
According to Gobaud and Lin, the system appears to have a large market since many want to avoid grammar errors and reply-all disasters. They also noted, however, that the system may benefit corporations looking to improve their email protection policies by automatically deleting old emails.
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Hotshot computer backgrounds,
Hotshot computer backgrounds, entrepreneurship coursing through their veins, nights and weekends coding up the service ...
... and they are in Harvard Law School.
Harvard Law School makes sense for these guys...
...because it sounds like they're better businessmen than programmers. The description of their service inevitably promises more than it can deliver. They don't go into much detail about how it works, but I can only assume that you end up sending emails with links to Pluto's site, where they try to display the email to the recipient in a way that makes it hard to save or copy. However, they admit that
"A recipient can still screenshot emails, print them, or otherwise permanently store them if they expend additional effort."
So it appears it's definitely like Snapchat for email, since Snapchat users can also save messages and pictures with a bit of extra effort.
Once someone actually has access to the message you're trying to send, once the data is transmitted, it's out there, and it may come back to haunt you, regardless of Pluto's promises.
Records are Records are Records
I think this has its benefits, but in the business world, the trend is towards saving for a period of time, for business needs, for compliance needs, etc. This service sounds very good for non-records, but not for what ought to be tracked. Example - in Apple v Samsung or Samsung v Apple, one side was sanctioned for spoliation of evidence - meaning they could not produce emails when ordered to do so.