I think someone should write a better promo for them because I’m not even sure what it does, never mind deciding if I need it or not. I think I may wait to read some comments and reviews before deciding. Thank you for the offer regardless.

It looks like they are using the Tabbles program as the underlying engine for this Confidential program. Very nice to see a giveaway licensed for commercial use. After reading the (as usual) excellent comments from Peter Blaise, it looks like they need to do a better job of describing what this does, why you need it and what other software it requires. In my experience something like this would normally be sold by some consulting company, with 2 or 3 sales meetings up front to see if it’s a good fit and whether they can convince the client that they have a problem requiring a solution costing a large amount, then a team to help install & train followed by a very high annual maintenance fee. If you need this you probably already know all about GDPR (I don’t!). From my understanding of Tabbles, it would be a very useful tool for tracking and managing confidential data, especially in a corporate environment. It looks like they added something to scan files for specific data formats so people won’t have to search through every single file — a very big improvement if it works well.

[@Peter Blaise]

Hi Peter,

note from the developers:

1 – BAD NAME: “Confidential” is a horrible name because the word already has a plethora of meanings, and do I really want a subdirectory on my computer named “Confidential” if I do not have one already — hello, any hacker / cracker will be drawn to that like flies to honey. I suggest “Commander Tagger” ( inside joke referring to the movie Galaxy Quest ), or “Gate Keeper” or “AtoZ Sorter” or something arbitrary like GIDNORK ( really, I just randomly typed that ).

Ok :)
Any hacker that access that subdirectory won’t find anything interesting as the config files and the database files are in %appdata%\Confidential

2 – NOT ENOUGH PRE-INFO TO INSTALL: This is a raw programming tool for full-time-paid administrators who have way too much time on their hands, and involves making decisions on installation that only someone with vast experience with this software can make, they should simplify and automate, rather than expect me to know why I want to name a database without characters that I always use when naming other files ( no hyphens permitted ! ), or put the database in a location that … should I want this portable on a USB thumb drive or in a location outside my filing system, such as the root, or in the cloud, or where? I don’t know. How will I use the database, how will I back it up, how will I use it after crash recovery, how will I use it when I migrate to my next generation computers and also migrate my data, how will I inspect drives about to leave my property before they go to insure they are “clean”, how will I catalog my offline backup disks and discs and thumbdrives? Will it understand the contents of zip and 7z ( required so Windows 10 does not deny access to collected and compressed zipped data ) file storage … and so on?

Well yes, we could have done a better job in the copywriting of the promo…
But about the database part, the software is designed so that users just click the big blue GO button at first launch (which is what 99% of them do)… I recommend everyone to stick to pressing the GO button (hopefully after having read the text around it), try the “Local” mode and follow the tutorials.

3 – TOO COMPLICATED AND ARCANE: This is a raw programming tool for full-time-paid administrators who have way too much time on their hands, and involves making decisions on installation that only someone with vast experience with this software can make, ( didn’t I write that already ? ), and it’s third complaint about my attempted installation is a cryptic and unresolvable message:

See above.

“… Error … A network related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. ( provider: SQL Network Interfaces, error: 26 – Error Locating Server / Instance Specified ) … Sql Exception Number = -1 …”

I guess this is connected with my answer from above: if you try the local option the software will run using Microsoft SQL LocalDb in a transparent way, and you shouldn’t get any connection error.

4 – INSECURE ! : Their installation file has no file date in the security certificate, let’s get dangerous, risky, and unauthored, able to be scammed!

This is what puzzled me the most, as we’ve never heard about this complain before :-)
Indeed I found an article about this, we’ll try to get this sorted in the next builds. In the meanwhile, while there is no timestamp, the installer is digitally signed (with a Comodo signature that is valid for the next year or so) and as long you got the installer from Confidential.tech it should be ours :-)

5 – WRONG HELP: See their web pages and help for more, but get ready to stop all other human activities ( eating, sleeping ) until you figure this out and master it, and prepare to uninstall and reinstall it at least 3 times over 3 months as you realize only after each installation attempt that there is way more to each installation decision than they were able to pre-warn you about, and you have to start over from scratch to reconfigure everything using your newly acquired experience.

As above, I recommend you press the GO button at first launch.

They direct you to
[ https ://tabbles. net/wiki/index.php?title=Tabbles_Manual_(EN)#Setting_up_Tabbles ]
yes “Tabbles” in order to figure out their “Confidential” program … good luck imagining your own version of “Tabbles” instructions and applying them to their “Confidential” program.

That’s correct: as someone else pointed out, Confidential is indeed a “fork” of Tabbles, done by the same people as re-branding activity. This was based on GE use case of Tabbles and Confidential is in fact a super-set of features of Tabbles (it includes the explorer-tags, so you have 4 tags that you can assign from Windows Explorer’s Context menu and see in Windows Explorer when browsing). Since the software is the same (and the company behind it is the same) we figure we could stick to a single user manual.

6 – WHY ? : And for what .. for GDPR General Data Protection Regulations compliance? Uh huh. Meaning … ?

On confidential.tech you read “GDPR solution for unstructured data”. I guess you have heard about GDPR… again we could have done a better job with the copyright here, but I recommend you have a look at our website too.

Regards,
Andrea

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Thanks, [ Andrea D’Intino ], for your reply, but …

… I looked at the YouTube video ( that pops up locally but won’t play locally ? ), and it appears that your program has absolutely no intelligence about GDPR, or anything that we users consider at risk, data contents wise.

That is, it has no idea how to search file contents and AUTOMATICALLY identify information that would be of a concern to GDPR or to ourselves, or to anyone, personally, professionally, security wise, risk wise, liability wise.

That is, we, the end user, apparently have to tell this program everything that we think we know about GDPR-sensitive information ( … but there is no GDPR reference in the program to teach us what GDPR means to us ), we apparently have to tell this program our own specific character-by-character proper spelling concerns, we apparently tell this program everything that we think we have already told our computer before, and then we apparently have to tell this program to hunt for it, and hope that something good and useful will happen.

That is, if we have ANY file with risky content that we don’t know about, this program will not find it.

That is, this program is stupid ( ignorance is when you don’t know any better, stupid is when you do and you go ahead anyway ).

Sorry, but true.

For example, I have a teenageer who borrowed my computer for homework, and while doing so, created files containing GDPR-sensitive and personally-risky data BUT DID NOT TELL ME ABOUT IT — so how do I tell this program to find it?

For example, I download an email attachment from a friend that has a zipped photo file, and I don’t notice that it also has a data file in the zip file — so how do I tell this program to find it, especially the metadata that the camera created that neither my friend nor I know about?

I now load this program and … this program cannot seek and find that data or the metadata in the photo file that has my friend’s personal private information of when and where they took the photo, let alone the human-readable content of the photo, say, it’s a photo of a check they wrote to me, with bank account numbers and signature in plain sight.

And what about my cloud data on Facebook, public posts on Disqus, Quora, and so on, files I have uploaded anywhere, such as to TinyPic for sharing, Google Photos, MyShoeBox, such as photo files that contain medatada that tell folks when and where I go on vacation, where my home address is, and since I post my exciting vacation photos live as they happen, everyone can now know that I am not at home at the moment, so, burglars, have at it, my house is all yours for the taking!

This program has absolutely no ability on it’s own to find and identify any data, let alone any GDPR-sensitive data, or security risk, or privacy risk, or financial risk, or embarrassment risk, or any risk at all.

Dumb, dumber, dumbest.

— This program is dumb,
— data entry people like me are dumber ( I did not know my camera reveals my location, and the data and time when I was there, especially that I am there now, and not at home ),
— and I would be the dumbest to think that this program will find stuff I don’t know about because I have been lead to believe that this program is smarter then I am — it is not.

Thanks anyway, but your program is inappropriate for it’s intended task.

It’s NRFPTY — Nerf Putty — Not Ready For Prime Time Yet.

Next.
__________

Hey, kudos to you, [ Andrea D’Intino ], for designing an incredible resource with such powerful capabilities but … now get started on the really hard part.

AI artificial intelligence, ready to scan and pass / fail any computer, and possibly offer to clean it, at least to identify specifically what’s at risk, so that a human can take your program’s report and take action manually, manually review your program’s interactive report on screen with toggle on / off selections and a “go” button to clean, and or to move to another location, and or to zip / encrypt, and to scrub over the removed data areas with zeros, and to re-check … where your program:

[ 1 ] – works anonymously from a thumb drive, wiping it’s insertion history from the registry upon removal

[ 2 ] – scans every sector / cluster for contents, not just files, but slack and free “erased” areas that still contain passwords, banking numbers, parts of images, image metadata, fragments of personal documents, and so on — and check memory through a reboot cycle to ensure nothing remains in memory.

[ 3 ] – builds a database of computers scanned, where and when, all contents and actions taken and confirmed effective — data moved to where, data erased and confirmed zeroed, and so on — all on a local thumbdrive child-database that is mergeable with a central parent-database of all USB tools periodically, a parent database that has it’s own auditable and actionable reports.

Easy as 1, 2, 3, no?

;-)

Thanks for getting started.
.

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Got it, [ Andrea D’Intino ],

For you, “automated” means “you can [ manually externally hunt for, and manually ] import” … because the program doesn’t know how to do GDPR-related tasks OOB out of the box, so to speak.

And for you, “has nothing to do with web-located data” means, well, means nothing, since you yourself claim it has to do with “Dropbox”, as you wrote, and Dropbox is web-located data … and except for “Tag files on local drives, shared folders and in the Cloud ( Dropbox, OneDrive, Box.com, Amazon Cloud Drive etc. )” as in your product description here on Shareware On Sale’s opening page for your software, and, if anyone wanders to your product web page, they are promised that your software “Works on local drives, shared-drives and Cloud folders” ( well, good start on being aware of users being responsible for some web data at Dropbox at least, nonetheless ).

I was going to review the “Confidential” instruction reference manual for “GDPR solution for unstructured data” as your promotion promised “Confidential” is purposely built for … but there’s no instruction reference manual — apparently “Confidential” is not immediately ready to support anyone’s desires to audit and control GDPR compliance … hence my “Not Ready For Prime Time Yet” observation about your software.

FYI for your information, here at Software On sale is where you offer a full version of your program in the hopes of getting valuable insight from those of us willing to give your software a try and give you feedback, your chance to see how a new and random audience experiences your software, a chance for you to build up some goodwill in an expanding worldwide arena, where you listen, help fix anything that malfunctions if you can, and, to those of us who spend our time and energy turning our computers over to testing your offering, and giving you feedback in this thread, you always, always say “thank you”.

You’re welcome

( PS — Web dialogs are text, not tone. )
.

.
The is no “Go” button or “Scan” button or “Begin” button, so how do you get this “Confidential” program to do anything?

Okay, it’s NOT in the menus, but I finally found a way to get it to scan:

— right-click a drive in the left-window of the program
— — select Apply auto-tagging rules

… and go away for a long -t-i-m-e- …

Of course you have to find and download and install auto-tagging rules first, the program came with none, absolutely no GDPR awareness.

After 8 hours, it was still slogging it’s way though one backup directory structure of mine containing 6,000+ files in 60 GB of data … before I killed it, rebooted, and reopened “Confidential” to see what it hath wrought.

It marked a bunch of files as having country address and the like, personal identification numbers and the like, and so on, which I expected ( I have many epubs and mp3s as well as typical self-created documents ).

But, there is no way to identify WHAT data was found, no “here’s a list of social security numbers found, and in which files” or “here’s a list of street addresses found, and in which files”.

There is also no way of asking “show me files with Tom Jones” or “show me all files with Social Security number 0123-456-7890”.

It just tagged files as meeting some general criteria, no specifics.

__________

My overall assessment in 2 days ot struggle with Tag-Forge “Confidential”:

It is not smart, not intelligent, not savvy, not aware, not user friendly, not purpose-built for any one task, and as such does nothing.

Other programs call home for daily database updates, not so here, the programmers are not acting as a clearing house for GDPR-compliance references kept contemporaneous and authoritative.

Other programs build a relational database of file contents, no so here, this just looks, tags, and does not keep a specific record of what it saw that made it apply any tag.

The only thing a user could reasonably do with a report from “Confidential” is decide to keep the drive in-house, off the web, a decision easier to make just by deciding to keep all drives with self-created data in-house and off the web, no “Confidential” program needed.

According to the 80 / 20 rule, I imagine that whatever energies the programmers have put in so far is about 20% of what’s needed to make this do anything close to what it promises: GDPR-compliance assistance, they have 80% more to go, about 4 times more work than applied so far.

It claims to provide GDPR-savvy, but has none, even the programmer could only hint that scripts are available on the web, go find them yourselves, and figure out how to use them — that’s the level of support for their own claims and promises.

I … don’t think there is hope, considering how inappropriate “Tabbles” ( the underlying program ) is for a job that “Everything” and “Copernicus” and other file-contents-catalogers have a far better head start on.

This is not even useful as a “Tabbles” enhancement due to it’s lack of GDPR-savvy, such that even if people used this to discipline their use of a fresh, brand-new data drive, this program has no skill or capabilities to accurately and meaningfully audit a drive for compliance.

All I can recommend is that everyone just say “oops” and walk away, even the programmers.
.

1 – “Confidential” is a horrible name because the word already has a plethora of meanings, and do I really want a subdirectory on my computer named “Confidential” if I do not have one already — hello, any hacker / cracker will be drawn to that like flies to honey. I suggest “Commander Tagger” ( inside joke referring to the movie Galaxy Quest ), or “Gate Keeper” or “AtoZ Sorter” or something arbitrary like GIDNORK ( really, I just randomly typed that ).

2 – This is a raw programming tool for full-time-paid administrators who have way too much time on their hands, and involves making decisions on installation that only someone with vast experience with this software can make, they should simplify and automate, rather than expect me to know why I want to name a database without characters that I always use when naming other files ( no hyphens permitted ! ), or put the database in a location that … should I want this portable on a USB thumb drive or in a location outside my filing system, such as the root, or in the cloud, or where? I don’t know. How will I use the database, how will I back it up, how will I use it after crash recovery, how will I use it when I migrate to my next generation computers and also migrate my data, how will I inspect drives about to leave my property before they go to insure they are “clean”, how will I catalog my offline backup disks and discs and thumbdrives? Will it understand the contents of zip and 7z ( required so Windows 10 does not deny access to collected and compressed zipped data ) file storage … and so on?

3 – This is a raw programming tool for full-time-paid administrators who have way too much time on their hands, and involves making decisions on installation that only someone with vast experience with this software can make, ( didn’t I write that already ? ), and it’s third complaint about my attempted installation is a cryptic and unresolvable message:

“… Error … A network related or instance-specific error occurred while establishing a connection to SQL Server. The server was not found or was not accessible. Verify that the instance name is correct and that SQL Server is configured to allow remote connections. ( provider: SQL Network Interfaces, error: 26 – Error Locating Server / Instance Specified ) … Sql Exception Number = -1 …”

That’s a show stopper right there.

4 – Their installation file has no file date in the security certificate, let’s get dangerous, risky, and unauthored, able to be scammed!

5 – See their web pages and help for more, but get ready to stop all other human activities ( eating, sleeping ) until you figure this out and master it, and prepare to uninstall and reinstall it at least 3 times over 3 months as you realize only after each installation attempt that there is way more to each installation decision than they were able to pre-warn you about, and you have to start over from scratch to reconfigure everything using your newly acquired experience.

They direct you to https://tabbles.net/wiki/index.php?title=Tabbles_Manual_(EN)#Setting_up_Tabbles yes “Tabbles” in order to figure out their “Confidential” program .. good luck imagining yoru own version of “Tabble” instructions and applying them to “Confidential”.

Show stopper right there.

6 – And for what .. for GDPR General Data Protection Regulations compliance? Uh huh. Meaning … ?

Thanks for sharing, I hope someone dives in and tells us how to implement it, and why.
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