Brilliant Entrepreneur Spotlight: Burn Note’s Jacob Robbins

As noted on AllThingsD on Tuesday morning, there’s a new voice in the online-privacy debate: and for once, it’s not a 72 year old man trying to figure out how we young folks communicate or a faceless corporation trying to convince us that it’s not stalking us via data pulled from our mobile applications.

The new voice in the space is that Jacob Robbins, former head of Drop.io’s software development team (pre-Facebook-acquisition). The comment on privacy is clear: that hypersecurity is not a sure thing on any existing communication platform. For the most part, to date, our online lives have been fairly transparent to the developers of the platforms we use to communicate with one another and build our knowledge and community networks. 

The premise of Burn Note is simple, and as its name evokes, is a truly James Bond-worthy concept: log on to Burn Note, send a secure message, specify the duration of the existence of the message and the security of the text within it, and you’re done. The pitch of this secure network is that it uses no binary logging. In human words, this means Burn Note does not use backup servers or store emails. Only metadata— such as time of creation and medium of creation of content— is logged. 

The online privacy debate has been pushed into the spotlight in recent months by companies like Google through their “Good to Know” campaign. The legislation protecting user privacy, the Electronic Communications Privacy Act or ECPA, hasn’t been updated since 1986— 26 years ago.