Keybase Exploding Messages
Author here. I&#x27;m seeing the same comment in 4 different places on here, worded with various amounts of hostility. I now wish I had addressed this in the FAQ on the post.<p>There&#x27;s the suggestion that an exploding feature is worthless, given your partner can just take a screenshot or video of what you sent.<p>This suggestion is missing (1) that your relationship with a partner is disproportionately okay at the time you sent something (i.e., you trust them THEN) and (2) there&#x27;s a whole different class of adversary who compromises your or your partners&#x27; devices in the future.<p>SnapChat, as far as I know, has none of the cryptographic implementation of Keybase. And yet it has likely protected hundreds of thousands of kids from severe bullying. Consider the teen girl who sends the goofy sexy pic to her boyfriend. Before the advent of exploding messages, he might&#x27;ve iMessaged or emailed that to a friend, just one friend, his best friend, out of pride. And that friend sent it to a few more, and so on.  Not out of malice, but suddenly the whole school has seen her pic of god knows what and she literally wants to die. But with Snapchat, taking a screenshot is knowingly violating a social agreement. It&#x27;s also violating the trust of his current girlfriend - everyone knows it&#x27;s not okay to screenshot that shit.  And the number of people who would do that is much tinier.  Second, consider the far worse scenario: she dumps him a month later and until then he has been NiceGuy. But then he becomes r&#x2F;niceguy, the guy who will look through the old pictures and spread them around.<p>Finally, let&#x27;s not forget that your device can be compromised by loss, theft, or hackers, at any time. Exploding messages are gone when that happens.<p>People can be tricked, compelled, coerced, blackmailed, and hacked. Or just turn evil.  All in the <i>future.</i>  Which is what a timed message protects against.   This is why Keybase is doing this. Paired with encryption it&#x27;s quite powerful.