Trunx: Secure Photo-Sharing in an Insecure Age

There’s an undeniable sense of unease and lack of trust on the Internet these days, ever since the NSA’s PRISM surveillance program came to light earlier this year. To some, the idea that the government could or would be monitoring what we thought were private communications was a major shock. Now a photo-sharing app called Trunx is looking to ride that wave by providing a way to “capture photos and videos and store them safely and securely in your own private vault in the cloud.”

What Trunx offers iOS users (Android’s coming in the next few months) is a photo-taking and video-recording app that saves images directly to the cloud, bypassing a phone or tablet’s internal storage. Once there, your files are protected behind your account password and a four-digit pin number, all guarded by SSL encryption.* 

Additionally, the app will auto-organize your files by date, time and context with user tags and smart tags. You can also import photos from Facebook and Instagram, meaning you can keep everything in one place, and you won’t have to worry if those social networks go down or change their privacy rules. Essentially, Trunx wants to be your secure—and private—digital photo-repository.

All this is well and good if privacy is a concern of yours. As such, it seems kind of like the anti-Facebook, in that its sharing features are very controlled, and people have to go out of their way to see your files. So that raises the important question around Trunx: who is this really for?

People started using social networking services like Facebook and Instagram to publicly share photos and videos with friends (and, let’s be honest, strangers too). Taking the all-important social aspect out of it seems kind of silly.

Trunx is a nice idea in some ways, but in the end, it doesn’t seem to solve anyone’s problems. The whole point of posting photos to Facebook is to share them with as many people as possible. If there are photos you want kept private—well, having photos kept private is why people invented photo albums, right? Just don’t upload them to Facebook—boom, they’re private.

Maybe I’m wrong. Any users of Trunx out there give this app a shot? What does it offer that I’m missing?

*This post was corrected on December 9. The original version of this post said that you could “allow a selected batch of people to access your account and take a look at your photos and videos,” but this is not the case.  In truth, you can share photos to Facebook and Twitter from Trunx. I apologize for the error.