In the age of the social media, it’s harder than ever to keep your private messages private. When you send messages to friends, you have no way of knowing whether they save them or screenshot them. A fleeting moment becomes permanent in an instant. A new app called Confide recognizes and addresses this problem.
Confide makes message screenshots a thing of the past | Tsyhun / Shutterstock.com
Confide is a clever messaging app for iOS or Android that cleverly disguises messages and only quickly reveals them when it’s time to read. When you’re finished reading a message, it’s gone forever. Plus, Confide includes end-to-end encryption and a built-in feature that either notifies the sender when a message was screenshotted or altogether blocks the ability to screenshot while using the app.
Confide works best if you get your friends to sign up for the app as well, but if you have enough friends concerned about privacy that shouldn’t be a problem.
Sending Truly Private Messages with Confide
In order to use any part of Confide, you’ll have to sign up for the app. While it can integrate with Facebook friends later on, it can’t sign you up with Facebook alone. Take a bit of time to enter in your information and verify your account.
When that’s done, Confide will prompt you to send your first message. Pick someone or multiple people from your contacts to send the message to. You can optionally add a photo or document to send along with the message. Before sending, you can preview how your message will look to the recipient by tapping the Preview icon at the top right.
Note: If you don’t have any friends on Confide, which is likely since the app is lesser known, your message will send as an invite instead. Recipients must use Confide to view the message and more importantly, view it privately.
If you’re on the receiving side of a message, tap the conversation in Confide to open it. An animation on screen will guide you to swipe down on the lines of text because as you do, the app reveals each line after the next. It’s impossible to see two lines at once. If the senderincluded a photo or document, keep swiping down to reveal that as well.
You can tap again to view an individual line as many times after that as you want, but once you leave the entire message and go back to conversation view, the message is gone for good.
Now, you might be thinking just because someone can only view one line at a time doesn’t mean they can’t keep one finger on the message and use other fingers to take a screenshot. This is true, however, Confide handles screenshots differently depending on which platform you use.
Interestingly, Android users get the big privacy perk here. The Confide app on Android simply doesn’t allow screenshots. If a user tries to take a screenshot while the app is open, it just flat-out won’t work. Due to iOS limitations, this isn’t possible with an iPhone. Instead, if someone screenshots a message in Confide for iOS, Confide will notify the other person that a screenshot was taken, much like Snapchat.
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