In todays world of Slack, email and a gazillion other web apps and services, its become increasingly hard to search for information.
Did your boss Slack you or email you that information about your bonus Or did they share it via a Google Doc Who knows Clearly not you, but Journal knows.Journal, a machine learning and natural language processing-powered platform designed to search across all your web services and tools, today announced a $1.5 million seed round led by Social Capital.
Since receiving the funding about a year ago, Journal has been able to launch a beta community of users.
Today, Journal is publicly launching its Mac app, web app and Chrome extension.Were passionate about helping people use information effectively, Journal co-founder and CEO Samiur Rahman told TechCrunch.
In this case, we want to help people manage their knowledge.
So we want to help individuals to leverage all of the places that they have information right now.It was that thesis that led Rahman and his team to land on wanting to build a suite of tools that acts as a second brain for people.
Thats obviously a long way away but thats what our long-term vision is.Based on the demo Rahman showed me, Journal looks pretty darn useful.
I had an opportunity to install it, but I was hesitant to do so.
Thats because Journal requires viewing permissions to your email, apps and other services with which you sync Journal.Thats scary for a couple of reasons the main one being privacy.
For example, what happens if Journal gets hacked Or if the government requests data from JournalWell, Journal uses zero-knowledge encryption that ensures Journal employees cant read or decrypt the information of the user.
Heres a bit more information on how Journal handles security:Journalasks for view permission to the apps a user integrates so that we can enable search across their apps.To keep users information safe, all data inJournalis encrypted both in transit and at rest.Data such as the contents of files, emails, messages, etc.
are encrypted using the Fernet symmetric encryption method, which usesAES-128in CBC mode +HMAC-SHA-256with arandom IV.
This means that the data cant be decrypted without the secret key.
Our file systems where the conceptual index is stored is encrypted using Amazon KMS, which uses AES-256 in GCM mode.The secret key is a combination of a hash from the OAuth access key for the account youve integrated and aJournalsecret key.
If our database gets hacked somehow, the hacker would need to also be able to get access to our separate authentication store and our secret key to decrypt your information.Im not a security expert, so I asked mycolleague, TC Security Editor Zack Whittaker,for some insight.
He told me Rahmans explanation makes sense, further explaining that what Journal does is essentially split the private keys needed to access your data.
Whittaker said thats smart, but that hes more concerned about general trust.Journal has access to a treasure trove of data much of which would be very valuable to advertisers.
Right now, advertising is not part of Journals revenue plans, but that could change.I cant say for certainty that we wont, but I think ad-based revenue ends up creating some really bad incentives, especially when youve got all this really private data about people and their usage patterns.
The very likely route is that we end up going through companies that pay for teams to use.As with most tech products these days, it comes down to how much do you trust the company and how much do you care about your dataAnd depending on who you are, you may have a stronger threat model that is, what threats you face based on who you are.
Black communities, for example, are at a greater risk of surveillance by the government than white communities.
So you adjust your behavior based on your personal threats.Privacy concerns aside, Journal looks like a really useful product.
But well see if I get around to setting it up.