How to Safely Take Notes with Turtl

Taking notes is a basic activity, especially thanks to the mobile devices that most of us carry. The problem is that many of the options available profit from our data o they don't care enough about our privacy, something unheard of in a postsnowden world. Turtle is a solution to these problems.

In the words of Andrew Lyon, creator of Turtl, the application is used to capture notes, passwords, bookmarks (bookmarks), dreams, photos, documents and whatever you want to keep safe. Think of Turtl as Evernote with extreme privacy.

Privacy

But how do I know that Turtl is really private? When you register to use the service, a cryptographic key is created with your username and password to encrypt your data before to store anything on the servers, so neither your data nor your credentials stay in the cloud. This means that only you and those with whom you share notes can see that data. This has a disadvantage, of course, and that is that there is no way to recover a password or change it from outside the application, so once established it is better not to lose it. Finally, if you want to have full control of your data and have sufficient technical capabilities, you can use, Turtl on your own server.

Collaborative notes

Turtl has a function called Public person that uses your email (if you want to) to send specific notes to certain people, this way you can share your thoughts or collaborate on annotations with your team. This technology uses a 4096-bit PGP key, which makes it quite secure.

As the application exists for GNU / Linux, Windows, MacOS, Android and iOS, practically anyone can use it on all their devices. It also has an extension to capture web pages available for Chrome y Firefox.

Political implications

Andrew Lyon created Turtl because encryption should be easy. The sea of ​​available applications sell our data to advertising companies, they are constantly hacked because they think that using encryption is too paranoid, or they are simply compromised thanks to massive and indiscriminate surveillance by governments. That the encryption is complicated only leaves the common and common user their privacy to their own fate, so usually anyone with a little will and technical knowledge can violate the rights of anyone. Using applications designed from privacy allows us, at least, to make violence more difficult, that control that assumes that users are a profitable product or that assumes that every citizen is guilty until the opposite is proven (the opposite pole to the supposed universal presumption of innocence). By the same token, Turtl is 100% open source so that any developer can audit or to collaborate in your code.

What apps do you use to take notes? Have you thought about protecting your privacy in something as simple as taking notes?