Keep screen recordings private with HYFY
Remote teams can’t afford to expose sensitive data
“We love HYFY, but we can’t have videos be public”
This is the feedback (a.k.a. objection) we’ve heard again and again as we talk with the thousands of individuals, professionals, businesses, schools, and teams that use our ultra-simple screen recording software for Google Chrome.
There’s no doubt that collaborating using screen recordings saves our users time and money — but folks that work with sensitive data have a responsibility to keep that data private — and they deserve some help. HYFY is now there to support this very important use case.
Too easy to share?
In making it dead simple to record your screen & voice and share it instantly, we were relentless about removing friction. No settings, resolutions, encoding, storage, or post-processing choices to make — just record and share in as few clicks as humanly possible.
To make this work seamlessly, there was no way around it — videos needed to be public. That way, anyone with the link could view without jumping through hoops. Making it so easy to share with a team meant lots more videos and lots more shares —and hoops would be bad for adoption.
Since we started, we’ve noticed other screenshot and screen recording tools taking this approach as well — just drop you a public link and move on.
But we (and they) missed something very important — it can actually be TOO easy to share. That means it’s too easy for a teammate to accidentally record and share something that shouldn’t be public. It’s too easy to paste a link into the wrong Slack channel or the wrong email or the wrong website and then you’re stuck exposing your (or worse yet, a client’s) sensitive data.
How to make sharing simple AND secure?
We set out to design something that is a great balance between convenience and privacy with the following principles:
- Keep sharing videos as simple as copy-and-paste
- Make it obvious when a video link is public
- Make it one-click simple to turn a video link private
- Make it harder to accidentally share a public video link
- Make it easy for a viewer to validate their identity (no new passwords)
Introducing HYFY Business
HYFY Business is for teams that work with sensitive or confidential data and need to keep their screen recordings private. You can still copy video links with one-click, but now you get to choose the privacy level.
Once you toggle a video to PRIVATE mode, it’s immediately locked from unauthorized view (only you can view it in your HYFY library). Now you can restrict viewing to the following:
- Individual email addresses
- Email domains (e.g. *@yourcompany.com)
- JIRA / JIRA Service Desk domains
- HipChat groups
- Slack teams
To make it even safer, we made sure that videos recorded by HYFY BUSINESS users default to private.
For our forthcoming social sharing feature, we made sure that users realize that sharing a private video to a social network is not allowed — it needs to be public or it just won’t work.
When a video viewer visits a link, they’ll be asked to validate that they own the email address or team account required by the video creator. Authentication with an existing team or social account is pretty quick and easy these days, so we don’t mind delegating instead of requiring yet another password.
Failed authentication results in denied access. But we added the ability to request access in case there was some confusion on the permissions.
See For Yourself
Here is a HYFY video demo of the privacy feature in action:
Getting down to business, free for 30 days
We truly feel that video is a superior way to work, teach and collaborate (see “Killing screenshots, one HYFY at a time”). Our goal to get HYFY into as many teams’ hands as possible to show them how much time this can save.
To that end, all new and existing HYFY users get 30 days to try out all HYFY BUSINESS features for free, including video privacy and 60-minute recording time per video.
After the 30-day free trial, HYFY BUSINESS is a paid upgrade that costs $10 per month. Teams of 2 or more can contact us for very special volume discounts.
Learn more about HYFY BUSINESS at https://www.hyfy.io/business. If you don’t need video privacy, check out HYFY PRO at https://www.hyfy.io/pro
We hope you enjoy HYFY — tell us what you think!
