Thanks to a number of high profile leaks over the summer, digital privacy is very much at the forefront of our minds. Most of us fear it more than murder. If it isn’t Apple’s “secure” iOS dropping a couple of hundred celebratory naughty pictures, it’s SnapChat users accessing the service via a third party server and discovering that this has been recording the images. Away from the high profile stories, cybercrime has consistently been on the rise over the last couple of decades. It’s difficult to differentiate between scaremongering and the real threat, as I would expect it to be on the rise given that more and more people are living life online, but when it comes to digital privacy, it’s worth being safe. And one of the ways that we can maintain privacy is by using a secured messaging service, which is where today’s story fits in.
There’s a new and secure way to communicate on the scene, called Wire and backed by one of the Skype founders, Janus Friis. The service has been designed by a team of more than 50 people across 23 countries. Wire has support for voice calls, picture sharing, SoundCloud tracks, YouTube and more. The service synchronizes your messages across all of your devices, but one of its strongest features is crystal clear high definition audio quality combined with the privacy and security features. Wire encrypts voice calls end to end, whereas messages are encrypted to and from their data server. Voice calling uses the WebRTC standard, so users won’t need to install an additional browser plugin for a WebRTC-compliant browser; the voice calling service uses Wire’s in-house high fidelity audio technology, designed to give users excellent call audio quality. According to the business, Wire complies with “European privacy laws and regulations.” The application is free and available for Android, iOS and Mac systems and a PC version is expected in the next three months. There are also plans for a web browser version build over HTML5. As you can see from the images, Wire has a modern, clean interface and looks fun to use: what more do we want from our messaging applications? More users, I guess…
Currently, the Android version only supports smartphones – Wire says that there’s a tablet version in the works, but it’s a start. So, if you fancy giving the application a try, hit up this link. And if you give Wire a shot, let us know in the comments below!