Mark Cuban, who became wealthy by co-creating Broadcast.com
and selling it Yahoo, has had a lot of interesting business experience, some of
it good and some of it bad. His
experiences led him to create a new phone app called Cyberdust.
He wanted to create secure messaging that even the
government couldn't discover. An interview
of Cuban by Henry Blodgett on Business Insider
explains the app and its value when it comes to creating private communication.
"I had to battle a government entity called the FCC,"
he explained to Business Insider. "I would say the sky is blue, and they
would come in and look at message, and they would say no what you really meant
was the sky is green."
To say the least, it made him mad.
"What I learned, when you send a message, the minute
you hit send, you lose ownership but you don't lose responsibility," he
added.
He wanted a way to have secure communication.
"What Cyberdust does is eliminate any trace of a
message or text once it has been read," Cuban explained. "When two users exchange a message – you
send me a message -- it never touches a hard drive. It never touches our server.
We don't even have server logs so it's completely anonymous, not like some of
these other guys who can go back and create whatever they want on your device."
Dusts, as Cuban calls them, can be sent to one person or to
thousands of people. Once they are read, they disappear.
"When we send a message, we have a little algorithm (so)
when you are done reading it, plus a little fudge, it's gone forever. ForEVER ," he insisted. "We have taken it from just being a
messaging platform to a communications platform, so not only can you do one-to-one,
but we'll have group chat -- group dusting we call it-- we can have 12 people
in a chat room and all that is completely private and completely anonymous if
you want to be anonymous."
Cuban said he used to tweet after his appearances on Shark
Tank, but he got frustrated and angry with comments made by what are called
trolls, otherwise known as rude, nasty, insulting people who sometimes frequent
the internet.
"Now I have an account called blogmaverick, and I'll
dust out, blast, what we call blast, to 150,000 followers, and when I get a
reply, I can answer the questions or not, but because I'm the only one who sees
the reply there's no trolls. It's troll
free."
Cuban even has a personal reason he likes Cyberdust.
"I have a daughter who's 11 years old, and at some
point in time she's going to send a message to a boy, and that little boy is
going to screen capture that post, and all it takes is that one post being put
on social media, and my daughter's life is upside down," Cuban said. Well, it's not if she's using Cyberdust.
Cuban said Cyberdust might be useful in business, for
example, if there's a problem with an employee and it needs to be discussed for
comment. "You know you're going to have to do a deposition, you know
you're going to have to produce everything, but with us, it's discovery free. There's
nothing to discover."
Cuban explained that there are no server logs for the messages
and that the "dusts" can't be forensically retrieved or recreated
from a hard drive.
Full interview:
http://www.businessinsider.com/mark-cuban-cyber-dust-messaging-app-snapchat-2014-12
