Filesharing pioneer BitTorrent, Inc. has entered the private communication space with a new secure messenger called Bleep. The service has been in testing for nearly a year, and it is now publicly available on iOS, Android, Windows and Mac.

“We’ve been listening,” Farid Fadaie, senior director of product development at BitTorrent, wrote on the company’s blog. “Listening to our community’s feedback, as well as the dialogue that has been taking place around privacy, data-collection and the social cost of technology bringing us closer together. We’ve decided that one of those costs should not be your identity. And by identity, we don’t just mean your personal details, but also what you choose to say and how you say it.”

Bleep does not require an account to use. Users are able to choose a nickname, but instead of creating an account, they are assigned a unique user key that they can then share with friends. While users can verify their email address with the service so friends can find them more easily, this feature is entirely optional.

Peer-to-peer chatting

Bleep offers end-to-end encryption, and its messaging protocol  is peer-to-peer, so there is nothing saved to the Cloud. In other words, only the sender and the receiver are able to see the messages.

“Bleep’s logo represents a folded note – a message passed directly, hand-to-hand,” Fadaie wrote. “In our implementation, we keep messages and the encryption keys for images stored on your local device, not the Cloud. For messages and metadata, there is no server for hackers to target and because you hold the keys, images can’t be leaked to haunt you later. We’ve solved serverless peer-to-peer messaging, including the ability to get offline friends your messages when they come back online.”

The latest release of Bleep includes a new feature called whisper, which allows users to send self-destructing messages that are only readable for 25 seconds after being viewed. When messaging on Bleep, users are unable to see both nicknames and messages at the same time, providing some protection from users screenshotting conversations. Bleep is also cross-platform and supports free voice calls.

Image credit: BitTorrent (c)