Security
Write.as is a tool for sharing text online anonymously or under a pseudonym.
How anonymous posting works
When you start writing a post, the Write.as web or mobile app saves the content to your device, in a location secure from other website or application access. Once you publish a post, we store that post and generate a unique URL and token for it that only you know. This lets you or anyone with that ID access that post online. It is up to you whom (if anyone) you share that URL with. If you don't share it, only you will see it.
While it's technically impossible for Write.as to fully hide your identity, following a few basic guidelines and posting this way will give you the strongest identity protection.
What it protects against
- Someone knowing you use Write.as based on reading a post. We host over 28,000 individual posts on Write.as, written by thousands of people over the course of years. This mixing pot of mostly-anonymous writers helps obscure the identity of anyone who uses Write.as. As time goes on and more people publish on Write.as, everyone will benefit from stronger obfuscation.
- Us knowing who you are. Write.as does a few things to keep you anonymous. It's available over Tor; we scrub data linking IP addresses with posts from our application logs; and we purge our server logs after 7 days to protect our users. Also, the IDs of each post you publish anonymously are stored on your device, and this combined list never reaches our servers, thus ensuring we can't correlate multiple anonymous posts with a single author.
- Readers finding other posts you've written. Because each anonymous post stands on its own, accessible only by the explicit opening of a URL, a reader on any given article of yours cannot find other posts you've written.
How pseudonymous posting works
You can also create a Write.as username. This will let you access the list of anonymous posts you've created from any device, as we allow you to associate them with your username.
An account also lets you create blogs. Each blog you create under a single Write.as account is associated with your username, to again make it convenient to access all your writing on various devices and platforms.
What it protects against
- Readers finding other blogs you've written. Blogs stand alone just like anonymous posts do, so a reader on one of your blogs cannot discover your other ones through Write.as.
What it doesn't protect against
- Us knowing who wrote a series of posts. Creating an account sacrifices a bit of service-level privacy to gain some convenience. If you must minimize traces of your identity even from us, use Write.as anonymously. It's also possible to create an anonymous (from us) blog by creating multiple anonymous posts, and linking to all of them from a separate post.