The BIGGEST Problem With Notion (and most productivity apps)

so there was a period of time when my entire youtube feed was filled with videos from thomas frank to ali abdal to well pretty much every other productivity grew out there and they were all talking about notion this app seemed life-changing and succumbing to the influence of my favorite youtube celebrities i too jumped on the bandwagon and i was instantly impressed notion was and continues to be a revolutionary productivity app that my entire life runs on it's answered so many of the qualms i've had with note-taking apps from the past 10 years from the databases to the template feature notion has made running this youtube channel possible making me one of their probably thousands of loyal users but this video isn't like the others today i'm gonna be talking about an issue that i've been learning more and more about the issue of data privacy the bottom line is notion is not secure it does not support end-to-end encryption and that makes your data vulnerable and what does that mean can notions spy on you are they selling your information how much does notion know about us and ultimately does this mean that we should stop using notion before we dive into this i did want to give a little bit of background about myself while i don't use it i do have a degree in computer science and have some knowledge about security from clinical settings where we manage patient data to nih funded research at mit to processing clinical trial data at a biotech startup in all of these scenarios we are working with confidential patient information that could by no means be compromised but truth be told i never thought much about keeping my own data secure until i started this channel and i learned this lesson the hard way from having strangers recognize me in random meme groups to getting some often creepy sometimes distasteful dms on instagram and it scares me that there are so many others who have it a lot worse who constantly have a target on their back and have to be so diligent about their security not just for themselves but even for their loved ones and i am not alone on this i hopped on instagram to ask you guys how much you care about your data privacy and the vast majority of you also worry about big companies like google and facebook having access to your data so this is a problem that all of us in one way or another either have experienced or at least should be concerned about [Music] so as i mentioned notion is not secure it isn't end to end encrypted and if you're like me and don't know exactly what that means besides the fact that it's probably a good thing that's okay let's break it down together so suppose i'm texting my buddy samantha on whatsapp all end to end encryption means is that when i send that message no one else not even whatsapp can read what's been sent if we want to get into the nitty gritty when i send that message it first hits a whatsapp server before reaching my girl samantha without end to an encryption the server aka whatsapp can theoretically read this message to prevent this the message that whatsapp receives and stores must be encrypted converted to a secret code that it cannot break this message is decrypted only once it reaches the other party and only samantha and i have the keys necessary to either encrypt or decrypt the message nobody else and in the case of a note-taking app end-to-end encryption means that only you have the keys necessary to either encrypt or decrypt your notes this means that no third party not even the app itself can access your notes [Music] now before i start roasting notion i want to point out that nearly every mainstream note-taking app is not end to end encrypted by default i am focusing on notion because that's the app that i use and talk about so much on my channel but this is a universal problem and for the most part your data is relatively secure with notion since it is encrypted via tls in transit and at rest which is pretty much a standard amongst most apps this means whenever your data is moving to and from notion servers and once it reaches either their servers or your device it is encrypted but the thing is in this case the provider aka notion still has access to your data this will protect you from most third-party hackers but not from notion itself or anybody who compromises notion security the surprising thing to me was that notion has no intentions at least for the time being of implementing something like this primarily for the sake of its search feature and i guess this makes sense because notion probably knows that most of its users would prioritize experience and speed over security and since implementing a feature like this especially given notion size would require a lot of time and resources so honestly i respect notion a lot for being so transparent about this with its users in fact notion ceo mentioned in a recent q a that ultimately the security of our data lies in the trust that we have in this company that we should trust that notion employees won't be snooping on our data and we should trust that notion has these safeguards in place to prevent a security breach on their end and of course this didn't sit well with many notion users because it's hard for us to trust that any company would prioritize our needs above theirs on reddit there were plenty of people who said things like this that they love everything about notion but poor security is a deal breaker [Music] so the good thing is that most of the time your data is not that vulnerable but in the case of a data breach which has happened with much bigger companies than notion the lack of end-to-end encryption will make it so much easier for attackers to gain access to your data and this reddit user put it best they said that a possible scenario would involve specific employees being targeted by hackers where compromising the credentials of even one employee would make the attacker able to access the data and i think this is a pretty similar situation to what happened with the recent twitter hack where specific employees were targeted to plan fake tweets on accounts of society's most influential people and this is even worse for those influential people who happen to use notion who can be personally targeted either internally or externally and of course notion knows this and is already upfront that they are not liable in the case of such a breach now notion employees are bound by a legal contract not to abuse their access to your data but the thing is even if we trust notion and its employees which i do this is just an added level of vulnerability that can be exploited especially as notion grows and becomes more and more prominent so again it all comes down to trust how much do you trust notion and let's be real notion is not at all alone in this even the biggest tech companies those with seemingly endless resources and money face numerous data privacy issues far worse than notions i mean let's look at what already happened facebook exposed up to 87 million users raw data to a researcher at cambridge analytica the same data that was later exploited to create hyper targeted political ads in the 2016 election and consider the fact that google is still ultimately an ad based company and thus leverages nearly everything about its users from their location history to photo libraries to app usage to optimize these ads or take tiktok which has already been banned in india and maybe even the us over supposed security concerns due to its obligations to hand over data to the chinese government if requested and the trend here is that all of these companies hook us users with these free products and i'm pretty sure we're all aware that this comes at a cost our data privacy and for my survey even though most of you are concerned about this at the end of the day you consider the benefits of these apps to outweigh those risks and yeah i agree but what about note-taking apps while google and facebook track random info in exchange for these free products notion keeps track of information willingly entered by its users and when we use apps like notion we don't think twice about storing our most personal information because we assume it's safe for example people might store their finances or personal health logs or proprietary company information these are all things that we don't want people to see which is why we store them in notion or evernote or rome or what have you and i know that most of you want all of your data to be secure regardless of the platform on which it's stored so the real question is would you feel comfortable with a notion employee or even worse a third party hacker potentially reading your deepest darkest secrets and ultimately that is the question that we should ask ourselves with everything that we put online [Music] and to be honest i was pretty alarmed by all of these things that i learned when i was researching this video so you might be wondering is all of this enough to stop me from using notion well no notion is still hands down my favorite productivity app and at least for the time being i'm not that paranoid about my privacy to completely prioritize it over everything else but a few things will change going forward first i'll be far more careful about what i put on notion even now with apps like messenger or gmail i act assuming that one day all of my information can get leaked and that i would be okay with the repercussions of that so i'll have to do the same thing with notion second i want to educate myself more about security and privacy because it's pretty freaky how much of our information is out there and i've been in need of an excuse to watch netflix so i'll probably start by watching the social dilemma which many of you have recommended but if you have any other suggestions whether it's articles or books or documentaries let us know in the comments down below and after all this isn't an issue that just notion faces but it's really encouraging to see that notion's long-term goal one day is to beef up their security and implement end-to-end encryption even if it's difficult and hopefully others will follow their lead and not choosing between user experience and security but finding a way to balance them both and yeah that's it for today's video i know it was a bit different from the usual and i'm probably gonna lay low from the notion videos for a little bit at least until i can wish you guys a happy 2021. but i want to know for those of you who completed the insta survey did this change any of your thoughts about security and privacy and just generally did this make you reconsider how you use productivity apps let me know in the comments down below and yeah if you like this video please give it a big like and subscribe follow me on social media if you don't already and i'll see you in the next one [Music] oh [Music]

Channel: harshibar

Views: 476,264

Keywords: harshibar, notion, notion app, notion security, notion privacy, problem with notion, notion problem, using notion, notion setup, notion 2020, harshibar notion, note taking apps, productivity apps, is notion encrypted, is notion secure, notion encrypted, biggest problem notion, notion app security, notion encryption, secure notion, notion secure, notion data breach, notion data privacy, notion slow, notion down, is notion safe, is notion down, saveNotion, saveOurData, data

Id: HhWUjp5pD0g

Length: 13min 18sec (798 seconds)

Published: Mon Oct 05 2020