Dallas Mavericks Owner and billionaire Mark Cuban spoke with FOX Business Network’s (FBN) Deirdre Bolton about his new messaging app Cyber Dust saying “I want everybody to be able to shrink their digital footprint and take control of it.” When asked about the base cost not being more than a few million Cuban said, “Not even close. It’s less than a million dollars so far.” Cuban went on to talk about the size of his team saying, “15 is our programming group because we’ve got to get out there fast. It’s quickly moving. We’re updating it every two – three weeks. We’re adding group chat, we’re adding video we’re adding a lot of mapping, a lot of different features and we’ll have a new update next week as a matter of fact.”
Mark Cuban on his new app Cyber Dust:
“Well, the whole point is we have to shrink our digital footprint, part one, and part two is no one has any privacy anymore. Cameras everywhere and people recording you. You never know. And part three is in texting the minute you hit send you lose complete control of that text. “
Mark Cuban on how this size of the Cyber Dust team:
“Oh my goodness, globally, I’m not even quite sure. We got a lot of people working…I mean 15 is our programming group because we’ve got to get out there fast. It’s quickly moving. We’re updating it every two – three weeks. We’re adding group chat, we’re adding video we’re adding a lot of mapping, a lot of different features and we’ll have a new update next week as a matter of fact.”
Mark Cuban on the base cost of Cyber Dust:
“It’s less than a million dollars so far.”
Mark Cuban on the difference from Snapchat:
“One of the problems with Snapchat is, one, they just got in trouble with the FTC, right, because they were telling everybody that when you sent a picture it was secure and someone couldn’t save it. But because of the way they did it, by caching onto a hard drive you could save it. And there were — there was no privacy whatsoever. Cyber Dust is completely different. You can’t – there’s no apps that will allow you to save it. We never touch a device, hard drive, it doesn’t touch our server hard drive.”
Mark Cuban on whether the servers are purposefully not equipped to store data:
“No, it’s not that. What we do is we store it in random access memory. So it never touches hard drive. The risk people have from a privacy perspective is if I send you a message and delete it, it’s almost like our own PCs, you can find it and you can figure out a ways to get that data. So what we’ve done recognizing that, we store it all in random access memory. So it never touches a hard drive. We turn off the server, it is gone forever. So there’s no risk of someone breaking in and reformatting or recreating that data.”
Mark Cuban on the difference between Confide and Cyber Dust:
“Well, Confide is completely different. They’re trying to be NSA-secure. And they do a good job but they’re not conversational. We’re not trying to protect you from NSA. Really, you biggest risk when it comes to privacy are your friends, your families, your business acquaintances.”
Mark Cuban on Cyber Dust’s privacy:
“We teach our kids don’t put up pictures you wouldn’t want to put up. Right? Yes, we’ll send a text anyway with anything on it and thinking there is no consequences. There are consequences. Potential consequences for every text you send. Cyber Dust which is available in iOS now and be Android the end of the month, it deletes everything 30 seconds after you send it.”
Mark Cuban on his daughters using Cyber Dust:
“I have two daughters. They’re not old enough to text yet but I want them to use this because there is going to be a point in time where they send a silly text to some guy…. They will send a text, saying I love you for getting my job. And he’s going to say, see, she loves me and posts it on Facebook or posts it on Twitter and it will take on a whole new context. I want everybody to be able to shrink their digital footprint and take control of it. “
Mark Cuban on what it has taken to get his idea of Cyber Dust off the ground:
“It’s not horrible with all things considered because it’s a viral product once you get people starting to like it because both sides both have to have Cyber Dust because if Deirdre wants to use it you got to tell your friends and invite your friends and if they like it they will tell their friends, so we’ve seen in two months this just takes off.”
Mark Cuban on his goals for next year with the Dallas Mavericks:
“Our goal is always to win a championship, but I tell all our players there is one winner and 29 teams tied for last place, so we lost in game seven to San Antonio last week so that was painful, but you know we have a good team and we’ll grow from there.”
