Co-founder of Pirate Bay creates a mobile instant messenger protected from wiretapping

Peter Sunde is one of the founders of The Pirate Bay tracker, together with his Flattr.com colleagues, Linus Olson and Leif Högberg, intend to create a mobile instant messaging application that the special services and corporations cannot read. The application is called Hemlis ("secret" in Swedish). It will be based on proven technologies, such as XMPP and PGP, and completely free in the basic version. Advanced features, such as photo sharing or, in the future, voice and video chat, will be available for money. The application will not be advertising, and the sale of personal data and wiretapping will not be technically possible - says Peter Sunde. The only way to read private correspondence is to get control of the phone of one of the interlocutors.



Developers emphasize the ease of use of Hemlis - many cryptographic tools are difficult to master and inconvenient to use. Sunde, Ollson and Högberg believe that the mass distribution of protected technologies that protect the user's privacy is only possible if they are made simple, convenient and attractive.


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On the project site is collecting funds. The target amount of the crowdfunding campaign is $ 100,000, half of which has already been collected in the first day. Beckers have a priority opportunity to register a username and immediately get access to all additional functions. The money will be spent on the development and creation of a secure infrastructure. Hemlis will work on Android and iOS platforms, support for other OSes may appear in perspective.

The authors of the project write:

“We love the Internet and social networks, thanks to which we can share information with other people. We post something on Twitter or Instagram and the whole world can see it - great!

But we really don't like the fact that private correspondence is gradually becoming completely open to corporations and governments.

Power forces companies such as Facebook, Twitter, Apple and Google to open all the information about their users and at the same time forbids even to warn them about it!

We make an instant messenger that no one can listen to, even ourselves. We will close the service rather than let anyone break the privacy of correspondence.

Secrets remain secrets only if they are truly secret. ”

UPD: The Hemlis developers blog has a first informative post with answers to frequently asked questions about the features of the messenger, its network infrastructure, etc.