On fencing a folder

You know that feeling of coming home and, without thinking, closing the door behind you. Not because you're afraid. Because inside is the part of the day that belongs to you.

Software rarely gives you that. It gives you accounts, sync icons, little green dots, receipts of your own existence sent quietly to strangers. It gives you the sensation of being read while you read.

Elba is smaller than that. It is a fence you draw around one folder. Everything inside is scrambled the moment you close it — not by us, not by anyone you have to trust, but by your own browser, using a key that lives only in your head.

The metaphor we kept coming back to, while making it, was the garden wall. Not a bunker. Not a panic room. A wall you can lean on. A gate you close because it is evening now, and the day is done.

There is a technical version of this story, and it is in the Manual. But the human version is simpler. You should be allowed to have a room that no one else can walk into. Not a special one. Just a room.