Privnote alternative

These two do the same thing and the difference is narrow, so here it is plainly. Privnote has more options — notes can last thirty days rather than seven, it will email you when yours is read, and it speaks seventeen languages. This one is encrypted in your browser before anything is sent, with the key held in the part of the link a browser never transmits, and it carries no advertising or tracking of any kind. If you are sending a password to a colleague this afternoon, either is fine. If it matters that the service cannot read what you sent, that is the reason to use this one.

Privnote simply has more of the useful settings. A note can be set to self-destruct after thirty days rather than seven, you can be emailed when it is destroyed, you can attach a reference name so you know which note was which, and the interface exists in seventeen languages against this one's English. For anybody sending these regularly, those are real conveniences and this tool has none of them.

The secret is encrypted in your browser before anything leaves it, and the key is put in the part of the link after the # symbol. That fragment is the one piece of a URL that browsers never send to a server — it is handled entirely on your machine, by design, and has been since the web was young. So what arrives at our storage is ciphertext and nothing that opens it.

That is a property of how the web works rather than a promise we are making, and you can watch it happen: open your browser's network tab, create a link, and look at what was actually sent. The distinction matters because "we don't look at your data" is a policy that can change, while a key that was never transmitted is not something anyone can decide differently later.

Neither of these makes a secret safe on its own, and it is worth being blunt about why. Anyone who gets hold of the link can read the secret — that is the whole mechanism. If you paste the link into the same chat thread where you would have pasted the password, you have moved the problem rather than solved it: the message still sits in that history, and anyone reading it later can open the note.

So send the link one way and, if it matters, put a password on the note and send that another way. A link in email and a password by phone is genuinely secure against the thing that actually goes wrong, which is a message sitting in an archive for six years. And the note has an end date whether or not anybody opens it, so a link forgotten in a drafts folder stops working on its own.

There is a 10 KB limit here, and it is deliberate rather than a technical accident. This is built for a password, an API key, a recovery code, a door code — the things people paste into chat and then regret. It is not built to send a document, and a tool that quietly accepted one would be encouraging exactly the use it handles worst: a file that somebody needs to keep, sent through something designed to destroy itself after one read. If you want to send a file, use the file-sharing tool instead, which keeps it for as long as you choose and can put a password on the download.