I had a little play with ReachBy this morning, a startup that claims to protect your privacy by storing all your personal details in one place. Wait, that sounds wrong. Let me try again. Reachby protects your personal details by storing them all together on a website. Hang on.. this review isn’t going well at all. No matter how I word it, ReachBy sounds a little counter-intuitive for anyone concerned about online privacy.

So I had to dig a little deeper to see just what the process is, so I signed up, and voila - I’m now presented with a contact form by which people can send me email (big whoop). I selected the option to have senders verify their email address before a message reaches me, and sent myself a message.

The whole process of writing a message, filling out a captcha, checking my inbox, clicking a link to confirm my email, then the message being finally sent was a bit laborious to say the least, but hey - it’s all about privacy right?

To be honest, this is nothing more than I could do myself (or anyone with a passing knowledge of HTML) and if I wanted people to fill out a captcha, and confirm their email every time they sent an email to SE, I’d sit down for 5 minutes and put it into my own site, and guess what guys? I already have a contact form.

I’m not at all comfortable with the idea of someone else being in control of this process, nor do I want to make it difficult for people to say “hi, please review my site”, or “Take down that review or we’ll sue you”. Both of which really brighten up my day.

Also, a startup has to eventually make money right? So how long before they start placing ads on profile pages? Sorry ReachBy, but there’s only one contact page I fully trust, and that’s my own.