Staying with Evernote is becoming increasingly difficult, almost feels like an abusive relationship. We are in a terrible era when it comes to personal privacy. This article was initiated because Evernote privacy policy was supposed to get updated in order to allow its data scientists to read your notes in an anonymized fashion in order to construct a better product for its users.
These San Francisco venture capitalist companies are bullying us, disregarding our needs, and disrespecting our private space. I was thinking long and hard on this topic, and with constant barrage of the negative news covering Evernote, such as:
- Reducing the access to two devices for free users
- Raising the price of the premium services
- Allowing their employees to read their notes. (later retracted from including this in privacy policy).
I stopped having hope for the future of online note taking, as well as privacy in general.
All these news are a terrible course of action for the company that is plagued by the pressure to produce for its investors, yet fails to do so. The reason why I decided to stay with Evernote isn’t my love of Evernote, but the lack of the alternative that would complete the job in a proper way, while protecting the integrity of my personal information at the sam time. A hard task it seems! Competition wouldn’t solve my privacy issues, hence I legitimately chose to stay for the convenience.
What are the alternatives
So when it comes to alternatives we stay with Google Keep, One Note, Simple Note and Apple Notes. The remaining competitors with dramatically less notes functionality would be Bear and Dropbox. All of these are Silicone Valley corporate style corporations. I am not a firm believer that Apple will behave in any way differently than Evernote will. It is data, it is on their servers, and they all answer to the US Government, so no privacy guarantees will be made. All of them are equally susceptible to hacking, and considering that Evernote servers are now on Google servers that I so strongly try to run away from.
Evernote handles my private data the exact same way as any other US Corporation will do.
What is my course of action?
I have more than a year left on my Evernote premium, so I will wait it out. I am not committing any criminal activity, nor am I doing anything wrong for me to worry about the surveillance.
For the time being Evernote is providing me with an immense value that is financially contributing towards my bottom line. I do not intend to stay with it for the long run, but I will slowly test out the offshore alternatives. One of the big data moments if you want to ensure solid privacy is to keep the data out of the way of the American outreaching government. So finding a technically viable solution of keeping the absolute privacy is either to go to a stable offshore country (which one is that again?) or to keep stuff locally, or to store data on a privately owned off shore server.
Whatever is the case, my best bet now is sticking with the Elephant, while slowly testing the waters.
