The Messaging App That Uses Cats to Keep Your Photos Private

Courtesy Wickr

Nico Sell wants to flood Facebook with cat photos—or, shall we say, even more cat photos.

Sell is the founder and CEO of Wickr, an encrypted, ephemeral messaging app that promises users substantially more security than competitors like Snapchat, and today, the company unveiled a new tool called the Wickr Timed Feed—WTF for short—that lets users share photos in an Instagram-like feed inside Wickr.

They can also share them with their friends on Facebook, which sounds standard enough. But there’s a catch: users can only share the photos with up to 151 Facebook friends, and anyone they don’t select will instead see a photo of an adorable little kitty.

This is possible thanks to steganography, the art of hiding one message or image within another message or image. It’s a widely used spy tool that Sell, a cyber security activist and one of the organizers of the hacker conference DEF CON, has co-opted and streamlined for Wickr users. She hopes the tool will make sharing data on social networks more secure, particularly for younger users.

According to Sell, the term “privacy policy” doesn’t accurately describe what most tech companies do with our data. “Ownership policy,” she says, would be more accurate. “The whole point of this is really control,” she explains. “I have a problem with Facebook owning my daughter’s pictures and conversations for eternity.”

Courtesy Wickr

According to Sell, Wickr doesn’t store any data on its servers. It doesn’t even keep phone numbers or email addresses, but instead lets users find their friends by assigning every number its own cryptographic hash. It’s this type of protection that inspired a 50 percent spike in downloads at Wickr after Snapchat was hacked back in 2014. Wickr is now used by human rights organizations and teenagers alike.

Now, Sell wants to bring that data protection to other services like Facebook as well. By subbing those images in with photos of cats, she says, all Facebook will own are the decoy images.

To use WTF, a user would log into Wickr, click the WTF tab, take a photo or select an existing one, add a caption or custom sticker, and choose up to 151 friends to share it with. Those friends can view the photo within their Wickr feed, just like they would on Instagram, only after 24 hours, the images self-destruct. Users can also choose to share the photo on Facebook.

Initially, the photo appears as a kitty picture to every Facebook user. However, users can double click on the photo and be redirected to Wickr. If the person who shared the photo has pre-approved that user, then and only then will he be able to see the picture.

Within the app, WTF could become an interesting alternative to Instagram. But even Sell admits the Facebook integration is a bit of a “stand up to the man” gimmick. “It’s a little bit of an educational campaign, if you will, about taking back control of your photos,” she says. And it’s still unclear how Facebook will react in them—albeit unlikely—event that users’ News Feeds suddenly fill up with pictures and gifs of cats.

That’s especially true in light of Facebook’s recent announcement that it would begin letting users flag posts as hoaxes. “It will be interesting to see how they respond. There are three possible ways. They could love it, hate it, or not even notice it,” Sell says. “But they most likely won’t notice us because Facebook’s already covered in kitty cats.”