Following the revelations made by Edward Snowden that the United States government – through its intelligence and security agencies like the CIA or the NSA – was using the Internet and mobile communications to spy on its citizens and even citizens from other countries around the world, people got much more aware and worried about the subject of privacy and secure messaging.
Accompanying this growing concern about privacy, a lot of secure messaging apps appeared. Some of them offer distinct features, circling around the same common goal: increase the privacy with which users communicate. One of the most recent apps in this category is SessMe.
Available for iOS and Android, SessMe works just like any other messaging app, but with one key difference: it allows users to “go back in time” and delete photos that were sent through it. The photos are deleted from all devices that ever received them, preventing some negative consequences that can arise from sharing those pictures, like photo leaks and public shaming.
However, users can delete anything on SessMe: text, images, audio and videos, from the entire network, even after it has been forwarded among other SessMe users. Content sent through SessMe is automatically encrypted, as the recipient is the only person who can unlock the content using a password.
Another interesting security feature is that, on the Android version of the app, screenshots are totally blocked, which means that recipients cannot reproduce the content with this method. On iOS, though, screenshot blocking is not a possibility, but users are notified when a different user takes a screenshot of content shared by them.
In addition, users can send images and other content using a “sneak peek” function, which content disappear after a few seconds – this makes it almost impossible for other users to really block screenshots.
If you are interested to know more about SessMe, be sure to try the app but, first, take a look at this video (slightly NSFW):