A notary handles documents most people see only a few times in their lives: wills, real-estate deeds, protection mandates, marriage and civil-union contracts. Each one is dense with information that has to stay private, and each one has to travel, to clients, to banks, to the land registry, to other professionals. For most offices, that travel still happens by email.
This guide covers what is actually at risk when confidential documents move by email, and a practical way to send them that keeps them private and your professional secrecy intact.
Why email is the weak link
Standard email is not encrypted end to end. A message can be intercepted in transit, it sits in plaintext on several servers, and it exposes metadata such as sender, recipient, and subject line even when the body is protected. Once you press send you cannot recall the message, expire it, or see who opened it. A deed you emailed in the spring is still sitting in an inbox in the fall.
For an ordinary business that is a bad habit. For a notary, a public officer bound by professional secrecy, it is a liability, because the information is not yours. It belongs to the people who trusted you with it.
What secure sending actually requires
Three things separate genuinely secure document exchange from security theatre:
- Encryption on the device, not just in transit. Many tools encrypt files while they travel and while they sit on a server, but the provider can still read them. Client-side encryption scrambles the file on your device before it is uploaded, so no one in the middle, including the vendor, can open it.
- Control that survives the send. You should be able to set an expiry, limit how many times a document can be opened, and revoke access after the fact.
- No friction for the recipient. A client or a bank clerk will not create an account to open one file. The best tools let the recipient open a document with only a passphrase.
A practical workflow
Use an end-to-end encrypted send tool for exchanging documents. You encrypt the file with a passphrase in your browser, send the link, and share the passphrase through a separate channel such as a phone call or a text message. The recipient opens it with no account and no software. Set an expiry so the document does not linger in an inbox.
For the files you hold on to, such as open files and archived minutes, store them in an encrypted vault where you control the keys, hosted in Canada under Canadian law.
Where Privatt fits
Privatt was built for exactly this. Send lets you send an encrypted document to any client or counterparty with no account on their end, and the Vault modes where you hold the keys encrypt confidential files on your device before they are stored, so what reaches our servers is ciphertext, not your clients' documents.