SpiderOak Semaphor to Give Team Collaboration What It’s Missing: Privacy

PRESS RELEASE

Kansas City, Missouri—January 28, 2016— In celebration of Data Privacy Day, SpiderOak today announced Semaphor, a new workplace collaboration tool for teams and businesses that care about privacy. General availability for Semaphor is later in the first quarter, and SpiderOak is accepting a limited number of pre-release invitation requests at https://spideroak.com/semaphor.

Semaphor helps teams improve their productivity by keeping members focused, informed, and connected. Teams can join group conversations, private message team members, share files, and install trusted third-party integrations knowing their privacy is protected at every step. Following the same privacy-centric architecture as all SpiderOak solutions, Semaphor uses a Zero Knowledge architecture that ensures nothing leaves a computer or mobile device until after it is encrypted and is never decrypted until it is unlocked with keys only located on individuals’ devices.

“More and more teams are benefiting from online collaboration and Semaphor is the first enterprise grade solution designed to ensure those conversations remain completely private,” said Mike McCamon, president of SpiderOak. “Stolen ideas are impossible to recover and can turn into successful business opportunities for your competitors. Your ideas matter and they deserve to be protected and shared only with your trusted network. Semaphor is not slack about privacy.”

Currently in development, Semaphor will be available on all major operating systems as an open source application.  Alan Fairless, founder and CEO of SpiderOak, said, “To make the project more accessible to security review, Semaphor is implemented from a single code base using Google’s Go programming language with gomobile.”  Fairless added, “Openness and security auditing are key attributes of responsibly building any new encryption product."

Teams can elect to host accounts with SpiderOak, or later this year, host on-premise for even increased privacy and security. Pricing plans will include free trials, individual user, and team plans all starting as low as $6 per month.

Semaphor will introduce several new features to the workplace collaboration market including its proprietary “nervous design,” password-free account creation, and keyless identity verification. Contrary to traditional privacy-centric application trends, Semaphor will deliver privacy without compromising beautiful design and user experience. Using concepts like color patterns and resolution to communicate different levels of trust, Semaphor will be the most privacy-friendly collaboration tool that also has an easy-to-use and attractive user experience. More details on these features will be available at the time of release.

Semaphor will join the portfolio of privacy-focused solutions from SpiderOak including SpiderOakONE for private cloud backup, Kloak your own social network, and Encryptr simplifying password management. To learn more about Semaphor, and other privacy products, please visit https://spideroak.com.

Internationally celebrated each year on January 28, Data Privacy Day aims to increase awareness and promote online privacy and data protection best practices. 

About SpiderOak

For almost a decade, SpiderOak has given people control of their data online. Its Zero Knowledge privacy cloud solutions are designed to be 100% private, innovative, reliable, and affordable for individuals, groups and enterprises. More than one million people have downloaded the online backup solution SpiderOakONE.