HASH, a startup incubating at Venture Hive, has released an app that allows people to communicate privately through messages that are untraceable and screenshot-proof. Especially targeted at politicians and business people who value their privacy, HASH brings to mobile the confidence and security that people feel when they have a private conversation in person, says Mayer Mizrachi, the founder of HASH, now a team of five.
How does HASH Private Messenger work? The app allows you to send texts of up to 120 characters in length as well as photos. Once you open a message you have 7 seconds to read it before it self-destructs from the phone and the servers. This ensures political candidates that their conversations won’t be emailed to the press. Messages are screenshot-proof by never showing the name of the sender in the same screen as the message. This means that even if someone takes a screenshot of the message, there is still no way to know who sent it. It’s also untraceablein the backend. HASH masks your identity and separates your messages from the user ID. All this makes it virtually impossible to relate any given message with a user.
The free app launched last week via the Apple AppStore. Initial user reviews were mostly very strong, although some had trouble signing in. HASH for Android is in Beta testing and scheduled to be released soon in the Google Play Store.
Apparently many people value their privacy. On the first day, 5,000 HASH apps were downloaded and the app quickly jumped to the top 50 in Social Networking, says Mizrachi, who came up with the idea while working on a digital strategy for a presidential campaign in Panama and seeing a leaked text message conversation result in a candidate dropping out. “Think about this: For every message that you’ve sent in your life, there’s at least one copy of it in someone else’s phone. With HASH this is no longer true. Now, you are in control of the things you say.”