Lockee to the rescue

16 April 2015

Using public computers can be a huge privacy and security risk. There’s no way you can tell who may be spying on you using key loggers or other evil software.

Some friends and family don’t see the problem at all, and use any computer to log in to personal accounts. I actually found myself not being able to recommend an easy solution here. So I decided to build a service that I hope will help remove the need to sign in to sensitive services in some cases at least.

Example

You want to use the printer at your local library to print an e-ticket. As you’re on a public computer, you really don’t want to log in to your personal email account fetch the document for security reasons. You’re not too bothered about your personal information on the ticket, but typing in your login details on a public computer is a cause for concern.

This is a use case I have every now and then, and I’m sure there many other similar situations where you have to log in to a service to get some kind of file, but you don’t really want to.

Existing storage services

There are temporary file storage solutions on the internet, but most of them give out long links that are long and hard to remember, ask for an email address to send the links to, are public, or have any combination of these problems. Also, you have no idea what will happen to your data.

USB drives can help sometimes, but you may not always have one handy, it might get infected, and it’s easy to forget once plugged in.

Lockee to the rescue

Lockee is a small service that temporarily hosts files for you. Seen those luggage lockers at the railway station? It’s like that, but for files.

It allows you to create temporary file lockers, with easy to remember URLs (you can name your locker anything you want). Lockers are protected using passphrases, so your file isn’t out in the open.

Files are encrypted and decrypted in the browser, there’s no record of their real content on the server side. There’s no tracking of anything either, and lockers are automatically emptied after 24 hours.

Give it a go

I’m hosting an instance of Lockee on lockee.me. The source is also available if you’d like to run your own instance or contribute.