Peerio

» see peerio.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Peerio launched on 14 January 2015, into the window where every technical person had read the Snowden documents and wanted something to do about it. It was a messenger and a file store in one application, running on the NaCl primitives, with X25519 handling key agreement and XSalsa20 doing the encryption. The pitch was structural rather than promotional. Peerio could not hand over your messages to anyone, because Peerio never held them in a readable form.

The founder was Vincent Drouin, working out of Montreal, and Nadim Kobeissi of Cryptocat came in as a co-founder, which is where most of the product's early credibility in security circles came from. It ran on iOS and Android and on all three desktop platforms. Account recovery used a passphrase instead of an email reset, because an email reset is a backdoor wearing a friendly name.

The company rewrote the whole thing from scratch and shipped the second version in June 2017 under CTO Florencia Herra-Vega. By then Signal had taken the ground for encrypted messaging by being free and by not asking anyone to think about it. WorkJam acquired Peerio Technologies on 13 January 2019. The service closed on 15 July 2019, and the shutdown notice was specific that messages, files and metadata would all be wiped rather than kept.

~ the dossier ~

~ the co-founder who walked ~

Kobeissi quit about nine months after founding it. He told Forbes in January 2016 that he had left over pressure to build custom versions of the app carrying administrative backdoors for enterprise buyers, which is the precise thing the product existed to make impossible. A company selling unreadable storage has exactly one asset, and it is the claim that no version of the software behaves differently for anyone. Losing the Cryptocat name over that argument was expensive in a market where reputation was the whole product.

~ why nobody around me installed it ~

Turkey in 2015 ran on WhatsApp. It had swallowed the SMS habit and most of what MSN used to do, and it was already sitting on every phone in the country, so whether a messenger encrypted anything was a question decided for people rather than by them. WhatsApp switched on end-to-end encryption by default in 2016 and the argument evaporated for the general public. Peerio was asking people to move somewhere none of their contacts were, in exchange for a guarantee most of them were about to get for free.

~ what replaced it ~

WorkJam kept the cryptography team and pointed it at workplace software, which is where a lot of consumer crypto engineering ended up in that era. The client was open source and the code is still readable on GitHub, so the design outlived the business by the usual margin. What did not survive was the user data, and that was deliberate. A service built so that the operator could never read your files has only one honest way to close, and Peerio took it.

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