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Ask HN: Snapchat for documents?
FD: this is part tongue in cheek, part market research.
The other day, I had to hire someone to do some writeups for me. They generously provided me final samples on the subject under discussion. It got me thinking that I could have taken their samples, told them I hated their work, edited it a little, and passed it off as my own.
That's when the thought came to me that maybe there's a market for documents which disappear after the first viewing from the receiver's device - a Snapchat for documents.
Use cases:
1. Play memory games or tests
2. If you want to send a VC your pitch deck but you don't want them to forward it to a company in their portfolio.
3. You may want to share some medical records with a remote friend or family but not let it linger on their device.
4. Share a treasure map with a fellow adventurer to convince them that you're legit and X does mark the spot.
5. Share a screenplay with Harvey Weinstein remotely because you don't want to have sex with him (sorry, this is a topical reference in case you're not in the United States right now.)
6. Share a sneak peek of financial data to reporters do that they can write glowing reports about your business acumen
7. Prove to Glenn Greenwald that you actually have real NSA documents
What does HN think? Should I drop everything, do this full time, and go from 0 to distinctly non-Thielian 0.05?
- andreareina 9y agoWhat's your threat model? You can't counter someone who wants to store the document -- just take a video of the device. So what you can do is prevent accidental saving, and keep honest people honest. For this, an expiring link will suffice for text, and other formats can be supported using e.g. data URIs (content isn't cached on-disk AFAIK, unless paged out), serving PDFs as images, etc.
- saimiam 9y agoIf they take a screenshot or video, maybe I can report the action back to sender notifying them that the receiver is not trustworthy. I'm told Snapchat does this for screenshots. I'll look up expiring links but do they need people to upload content to a server first before generating an expiring link? Threat model - none as such. For a person who makes a living writing blogs for others, their threat model is plagiarism. For a startup sharing trade secrets with a VC, the model is violation of NDA and so on. E1: never mind about expiring links. I figured out what they are from the other comment. You mean Send, right?
- sarcasmic 9y agoThe Verge: "Mozilla's Send is basically the Snapchat of file sharing" [1] Engadget: "Mozilla file sharing test wipes files after one download" [2] Firefox Send [3]; about page [4] [1] https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/2/16086272/mozilla-send-file-sharing-service-launches https://www.theverge.com/2017/8/2/16086272/mozilla-send-file... [2] https://www.engadget.com/2017/08/02/mozilla-send-file-sharing/ https://www.engadget.com/2017/08/02/mozilla-send-file-sharin... [3] https://send.firefox.com/ https://send.firefox.com/ [4] https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/send https://testpilot.firefox.com/experiments/send
- saimiam 9y agoSend is ortho to what I had in mind. Downloading the file expires the link (oh, this is what the other commenter was saying) but leaves a copy with the receiver.