App Launches that Allows Users to “Google Search” Their Lives

Journal is enabling people to search through all the web-based imprints of their lives.

apps
Your location services-enabled apps are selling you out. (Andrew Caballero-Reynolds/AFP/Getty Images)

There’s searching for the meaning of life and then there’s searching for the meetings in life. The “machine learning and language processing platform” Journal is providing app users with a one-stop tool to search through all of their Internet-connected files, apps and accounts.

Seemingly designed with the modern, multitasking professional in mind, the app can run a search through anything it’s synched to — like your email, apps and subscriptions — to find whatever it is you might know exists somewhere, but not quite where, on your devices.

“We’re passionate about helping people use information effectively,” Journal co-founder and CEO Samiur Rahman told TechCrunch. “In this case, we want to help people manage their knowledge. So we want to help individuals to leverage all of the places that they have information right now.”

As useful as Journal may be, the technology site pointed out a few privacy concerns that may make some potential users weary. Although the app uses “zero-knowledge encryption that ensures Journal employees can’t read or decrypt the information of the user,” there’s no guarantee that the enormously valuable bank of data it will amass won’t be hacked or eventually sold to advertisers.

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