Security is a spectrum, and perfect security is impossible. Attempting to lock down every aspect of your digital life leads to extreme friction and fatigue. The solution is threat modeling: identifying what you are trying to protect, and from whom.
The EFF Framework
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) proposes five questions for building a threat model: 1. What do I want to protect? 2. Who do I want to protect it from? 3. How likely is it that I will need to protect it? 4. How bad are the consequences if I fail? 5. How much trouble am I willing to go through to try to prevent potential consequences?
Identifying Your Adversary
- Casual Observers: Roommates, coffee shop snoops. Solution: Passwords, lock screens.
- Corporate Surveillance: Advertisers, tech giants harvesting data. Solution: Ad blockers, VPNs, avoiding Google/Facebook, using Wispr for sharing links instead of Slack.
- Targeted Attacks: Hackers, stalkers. Solution: 2FA (hardware keys), unique strong passwords, zero-knowledge storage.
- Nation States: Government intelligence agencies. Solution: Tor, Tails, air-gapped systems, extreme operational security.
Where Wispr Fits
Wispr is designed to defeat corporate surveillance, data breaches, and targeted attacks against the communication channel. By removing the server as a point of vulnerability, Wispr ensures that even if our infrastructure is seized or breached, your specific threat model remains intact. To see the concrete scenarios this covers, ten real-world burn-after-reading use cases maps the tool to specific adversaries. And the zero-storage philosophy explains why storing nothing is the most robust defense across all threat levels.
