Deleted after reading – Ensuring the ephemeral nature of your notes

Deleted after reading – Ensuring the ephemeral nature of your notes

Data collection and storage, creating ephemeral content be challenging. With cloud backups, caching, and data harvesting, information tends to stick around longer than intended. However, for certain types of content like private notes, shopping lists, or brainstorming scratch pads, you may want the content to vanish after reading, like a Mission Impossible-style self-destructing message.

Dedicated ephemeral note app

The easiest way to guarantee deletion is to use an app designed specifically for ephemeral notes. These apps typically have built-in automatic deletion after a set time, usually 24 hours or less. Examples include:

  1. Evernote’s Expiring Notes feature – Set an expiration date/time when you create the note. Great if you use Evernote for your main notes app but occasionally need ephemeral notes.
  2. Memo Pad – Simple iOS notes app where every note disappears after 24 hours automatically. Let’s you recover deleted notes from the past 7 days.
  3. Confide – Encrypted messaging for notes and chats that vanish after reading. Has screenshot blocking and other privacy features.
  4. Rumii – Ephemeral group messaging and notes. Similar to Confide but for collaboration.
  5. Signal Private messenger – Has a disappearing messages feature for truly private conversations. Great for individual chats.

The advantage of these apps is they handle the deletion automatically without you having to do anything. The expiration timeframe is short enough (24 hours or less) that the content is essentially ephemeral.

Device-only notes

The default notes app on your smartphone or other device. Whether it’s Apple’s Notes, Google Keep, Samsung Notes, or any other first-party notes app, these typically don’t sync across devices by default. Any notes you create will only live on that device. Once you’ve read it, just manually delete the note and it’s gone for good. This method works well for things like grocery lists where you need to reference it in one place temporarily, but don’t need it persisted anywhere else. The only risk is if you have the notes set to auto-sync with a cloud account case to manually delete the ephemeral notes before closing the app. With device-only notes, it’s under your control rather than relying on a fixed expiration date.

Use private browsing

How safe is privnote? Private browsing modes in browsers like Chrome, Safari, and Firefox also be handy for ephemeral notes. When you create or view a note in a private browsing window, it won’t be retained in your browser history or cache once the window is closed.  The downside is you have to manually open a new private window each time you want to view the note, and then delete it after reading. But as a quick and easy way to jot down something sensitive that you want to immediately forget about, it gets the job done.

The same goes for using a private browsing tab in the browser on your phone. Jot it down, close the tab when done, and the note disappears from phone memory.  The advantage of these apps is they handle the deletion automatically without you having to do anything. The expiration timeframe is usually short enough (24 hours or less) that the content is essentially ephemeral.