Self-destruct text messages

By redlined on Tuesday, December 13th, 2005 comments

A new commercial service named StealthText was released on Sunday in the UK that allows sensitive messages to be destroyed 40 seconds after being read.

Developed by a British firm, Staellium, it is designed to "allay worries about incriminating messages".

The company said it has had interest from businesses, the Ministry of Defence, as well as celebrity agents.

"The technology behind StealthText is derived from military technology, so the comparisons with Mission Impossible are justified," said Carole Barnum, chief executive of Staellium UK.

The most high-profile case of embarrassing text messages in recent years was the revelations of messages sent from England football captain David Beckham to his personal assistant Rebecca Loos. So apparently this service will appeal to cheating footballers like Becks....

Each text using the system costs 50 pence, though users have to sign up for a minimum of 10 messages so it costs approximately 5 times more than your average text message, small price to pay for getting rid of those sneaky texts...

According to the BBC article: "People interested in using the service to send messages have to register and download a small program onto their mobile phone. Once a message has been sent, the recipient receives a text notification showing the sender's name and a link to the message. After they have opened it, the message disappears after 40 seconds. Despite the fact the message will be removed from phones, users cannot entirely avoid a data trail. For legal reasons, a log of the message will remain on a secure server to which they have no access."

From the FAQs
>Can I send a self-destruct StealthText message to someone who has not already subscribed to StealthText?
>Yes, you can. They will receive your self-destruct StealthText and be able to read it as long as they have a WAP-enabled device.

So this isn't going to work to anyone, its not strictly a text either as it is sending a link to an actual page with the message on hence giving the ability to autoprune it after 40 seconds. To actually read the message we imagine this will take a few seconds at least, to connect to a page on my Nokia even with GPRS it has an initial delay of a few seconds, it would probably just be quicker to remember to delete those dodgy texts!

More information available at the Stealth Text official site @ http://www.stealthtext.net

Source - BBC