Despite what you may see on the Instagram account of a Saudi royal, the Arab world is traditionally a very private place. From the high walls of old cities throughout the region, to the fact that residents are still extremely wary of using their credit cards online, privacy and security play a lot on the minds of people here.
With that in mind, the American ephemeral messaging app Ansa is currently in the middle of raising a $1.2 million USD round in an attempt to tackle the Middle Eastern chat market, currently dominated by WhatsApp.
“This is a huge population which loves technology, but has serious security concerns,” says Anthony Mouawad, Ansa’s Lebanese business development officer, over a coffee in Beirut’s Sassine Square. “No one is targeting them.”
Like other off-the-record messaging apps like Telegram and CyberDust, and P2P apps like FireChat (which has been adopted recently in force by protestors in Hong Kong, who use it to chat offline), Ansa allows users to send each other messages with a self-destruct timer of varying lengths, kind of like SnapChat for texting. Further, Ansa doesn’t allow users to take screen shots of conversations, and even lets users know if the person they’re chatting with has tried to screen shot their conversation. You can even take back a message if someone hasn’t read it yet. Foolproof? Sounds pretty close.
Original article by Stephanie D’Arc Taylor
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