There are those born past a certain year that will have no idea what I’m talking about but — remember shoeboxes? Back in the day, they served a lot of purposes around keeping important things safe. Those pictures of your ex that you didn’t want to throw away? Stuffed in a shoebox and sequestered in the back corner of a closet. Your passport, birth certificate, and other vital documents? Shoeboxed. In fact, the word was so synonymous with holding on to what’s valuable that Hallmark launched a sub-division of its cards called Shoebox.
Now that everything is digital of course, it’s no longer as easy as closing the lid. The pictures, documents, and other objects that matter most to you need a different level of protection. You need apps and technology that give you Content Privacy, a different kind of digital privacy than the one you read about in the press all the time.
Data Privacy is abstract. It’s about the ones and zeros, the metadata underlying our everyday digital lives. It’s IP addresses, cell tower locations, lines of code — all the stuff that only makes sense once you have a knowledgeable expert around to translate it and shape it into assumptions about human behavior.
Our mission is to change the privacy conversation — it starts with the difference between the content and the numbers behind it.
Data privacy is important of course but we suspect it’s a vague term that doesn’t mean much to the average person. It’s an unemotional topic without a lot of weight — until, that is, it infiltrates your everyday personal life. And when that does occur, it morphs into a topic Keepsafe is much more focused on — Content Privacy. We’re on a mission to change the conversation and technology around digital privacy. And it starts by recognizing the difference between the content and the numbers behind it.
Content gives personal meaning to those ones and zeros, solidifying into pictures, texts, and documents. It’s digital objects and data that you can see, use, and control. It’s a scan of your passport, texts you exchange with your significant other, and pictures of your kids. In other words, it’s the stuff that matters to you. When Content Privacy violations happen, they may not make the national news (unless you’re Jennifer Lawrence), but you feel the effects much more directly and deeply.
We want to get people talking comfortably about privacy. It is something you have a right to and something you deserve, because it means that you are free to be yourself.
So giving consumers control of their personal lives again is Keepsafe’s number one focus. It’s about protecting what is yours, by creating digital spaces where you have control. We’ve had an app for a while — Keepsafe Photos — that works so well it’s being used by over 50 million people. But a few months back, we started talking more about why exactly we created that app and what other efforts we wanted to put toward the cause. It turns out, we want to put a lot of effort into it. And we have some pretty big ideas coming down the pike.
There’s an air of resignation around the concept of privacy these days. People seem to have given up on the idea of maintaining control over their digital lives. We want to bring hope back to the table. It is still possible to discreetly share what you want with who you want — or no one at all — whether it’s personal or for business. We want to get people talking comfortably about privacy. It is something you have a right to and something you deserve, because it means that you are free to be yourself. And we want to give you the luxury of an unedited identity again.
We hope you’ll check out our apps and keep track of where we’re going, but we also really want you to join in the conversation. What does privacy mean to you? How can we help give consumers back their digital freedom? Tweet us your thoughts, with #ReclaimPrivacy.
