Nowadays people are doing a lot more then ever to protect there privacy but still there are lots of things that are not found or lets say are not visible to search in 1st page of google. We will provide some of the lesser-known but mostly encountered privacy risks, and explains what can be done to protect.

In this part of lesson we will explain about the problem and also give solution.

Problem:

  1. Note taking apps are made in replacement of sticky notes or post-it notes for remembering something like have to buy toilet paper, have to buy sugar generally for quick to-do and grocery shopping lists. But people often store more private information.
  2. People save usernames, passwords, credit card information, and security or PIN codes. Saving private information to an unencrypted note-taking app is like giving away your all credentials to people and allowing them to use whenever required.

This is worrying considering that certain applications for note-taking are not encrypted by default. Encryption is a mechanism that scrambles text data, leaving it unreadable (usually a password or passphrase) for someone who doesn't have the key. This means that applications that don't encrypt your notes by default make them available for any individuals that have access to your computer or your note-taking app's login credentials. Most people are not aware that many notes apps don’t encrypt notes by default.

Solution:

  • Use password manager to store your credentials, you just have to remember one password and else everything is managed by manager which will autofill you credential as required, which also prioritize encrypting sensitive data by default. Also be sure to enable two-factor authentication (2FA) to defend against data leaks. There are many password manager out but to reduce confusion we have listed some of them that we are using from many years.
Open Source : Bitwarden  Freemium : Lastpass , Dashlane
  • Use noting taking apps which are Encrypted by default. There are lots of apps out there which encrypt note by default (zero knowledge encryption) but we will list some of them which we are using in our daily life which offer end-to-end encryption and are available for iOS, Mac, Android, Windows, and Linux.
Open Source : Joplin  Freemium : StandardNotes

Notes:

We have listed the encryption solutions available for the most widely used note-taking applications below:

  • Users can "encrypt the text content in a note" on Evernote, but it only allows this if you are using the Evernote web client on Windows or Linux, and currently does not allow an whole notebook or notebook to be encrypted.
  • On Microsoft OneNote, users can encrypt sections of notes on Windows, Mac, and iOS devices.
  • On Apple Notes, users can encrypt entire notes on any iOS or Mac device.
  • On Bear, individual notes can be encrypted by iOS and Mac users. This feature is only available with Bear Pro.