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Wednesday, November 8, 2023

For Your Eyes Only: JotCast Launches Enhanced Privacy Features

New features like password protection, message encryption, and controllable search engine indexing make privacy options at your fingertips when chatting

Forget diamonds; the internet is what’s forever. Public chats can be found by anyone looking for them, and sometimes – either due to a sensitive subject (like questions for a medical study) or concerns about anonymity, for example – that sort of openness might not be ideal. Sometimes, it’s better to have a little privacy.

Thankfully, JotCast now offers enhanced privacy features to keep your chats confidential. We currently have three layers of protection: password protection, message encryption, and optional search engine indexing. You can choose to enable these features when creating a chat. When creating a private chat, you’ll need to choose a secure password. This allows only the users you share the password with to attend your event. Even better, you can retrieve or change this password at any time from the edit chat page.


Even with password protection, extra protection is needed to make sure that messages aren’t intercepted. That’s why, in private chats, all messages — including private messages and discussion board messages — and all user aliases are encrypted using industry accepted best practices. Furthermore, private chats aren’t indexable by search engines. It’s important to know that while all public chats will have their results indexed by search engines after the chat is completed, you can disable this when creating your chat, or by editing a chat you’ve previously created.


This feature had been in the JotCast queue for a while, but advanced in priority due to feedback from our clients. JotCast takes client suggestions and requests very seriously. 


Still, just because we’re listening to the needs of our clients doesn’t mean those clients want the public at large to listen in to their chats. Now, JotCast enables you to have full control over not just the conversation, but also your participants. Happy chatting!