Vanish: Create Self Destructing Documents in the Cloud

Yesterday I posted a question wondering how GBM readers felt about the dangers of having their data in the cloud and there were some very interesting responses. Today I caught this on BoingBoing about a project called Vanish, that allows you to create a self destructing email or document that become unreadable after a certain period of time.

Here’s a quote from the Vanish site:

For example, using the Firefox Vanish plugin, a user can create an email, a Google Doc document, a Facebook message, or a blog comment — specifying that the document or message should “vanish” in 8 hours. Before that 8-hour timeout expires, anyone who has access to the data can read it; however after that timer expires, nobody can read that web content — not the user, not Google, not Facebook, not a hacker who breaks into the cloud service, and not even someone who obtains a warrant for that data. That data — regardless of where stored or archived prior to the timeout — simply self-destructs and becomes permanently unreadable.

Interesting, yes?