White House staffers are using Confide, an encrypted and self-destructing messages app; here’s how it works
For past two days, Confide messaging App has been in the news because President Donald Trump’s White House staff uses it. White House staffers are resorting to Confide — an encrypted messaging app – spurred by the airing of hacked Democratic e-mails. Several senior GOP operatives and several members of the Trump administration have downloaded the app to gossip about the Trump administration in private, the Washington Post and Axios have reported.
The reason staffers are choosing Confide over other secure messaging apps, like Telegram and Signal, is that Confide deletes chats as soon as they are read. In other words, by default the app deletes messages after they are read. “We immediately delete them from our servers and wipe them from the device,” says Jon Brod, Confide’s co-founder and the company’s president.
The app has become a craze among the reporters as well. “Suddenly popular among White House reporters: Confide,” Yahoo Washington correspondent Oliver Knox tweeted on Tuesday.
“It’s absolutely bananas over here,” said Jon Brod to Business Insider, regarding the attention the small New York-based company has received after recent reports.
For reporters around the world, Confide is also introducing a new, free, verified-badge program, said Brod in a Confide message. The journalist’s username will have a blue checkmark next to it. The function of this app is similar to that of Twitter.
Check out below to know all about Confide, the self-destructing messages app:
This is what Confide appears like. Those blocks mean you have received a message but you haven’t opened it yet. It’s available for most platforms, including Mac, iOS, and Android.
You need to hold your finger down on the blocks to read a message, which then discloses the message below line by line. This makes it difficult to screenshot or photograph the complete message.
The message disappears when you have finished reading or some time has passed by, and the app shows an animation of the blocks collapsing.
Confide is also useful as these self-destructing and limited-viewing features can be applied to images and documents.While the app is free, you can pay to unlock additional features, including message retraction.
White House staffers who are worried about being caught leaking have specially adopted this app, which has self-destructing feature. Another reason is that they are worried that they will be charged for leaking emails to the media. The company deletes all messages from its servers and wipes them from people’s devices after they are read, according to Confide. However, other secure messengers, like Signal, do not wipe read messages, which mean that they could be interrupted if someone gains access to a smartphone where the messages have not been clearly deleted.
However, there are some security researchers who are doubtful about Confide’s cryptography bonafides, typically because the app is not open-source like Signal and may use old protocols.
