How PrivacyNotes and PrivacyTools.io are connected
A few readers have asked how our company relates to PrivacyTools.io, and why there’s no team page anywhere on this site. Both deserve a real answer, so here it is in one place.
The relationship
Lifetime Labs LLC and PrivacyTools.io share ownership. That means PrivacyTools.io is not a neutral third party when it covers our apps: when PrivacyNotes shows up there, read it as us telling you about our own product, not as an independent recommendation.
We think the honest approach is to say that outright, so you can judge that coverage accordingly.
Why there’s no team page
We keep team details private: no names, no photos, no locations, no headcount. That’s a deliberate choice, not an oversight. We build privacy software, and we apply the same principle to ourselves that we apply to your notes: information that doesn’t need to be public shouldn’t be.
Publishing personal information about the people behind a privacy company creates risks that aren’t necessary for users to evaluate the software. Keeping the team private keeps the focus on what users can actually verify: the product.
Some people prefer to trust faces. That’s a reasonable preference; ours is different. Personal identities are not evidence of trustworthy software. Code, architecture, documentation, and reproducible verification are.
Where we come from
What we will say about ourselves: the experience behind Lifetime Labs goes back to 2015 in the privacy community, on the recommending side before the building side. We know what this audience checks, because we’re the audience. That’s also why the apps are local-first and account-free instead of privacy-themed subscriptions.
On the past
Long-time readers know PrivacyTools.io has history, including a public falling-out years ago. We’re not going to relitigate it here, and we won’t in support emails either. Our energy goes into shipping good software, not tending old arguments.
We don’t think revisiting that history helps you evaluate the software. The disclosure above and the technical evidence below are more relevant.
What you can verify instead
PrivacyNotes is open-core today. The core is public, and we’ve published an encryption verification script so you can confirm for yourself that notes are encrypted on your device before anything leaves it, without taking our word for anything. No account is required to use the app.
Open-sourcing the apps themselves, plus an independent audit, is on our roadmap, and we’d rather point you at that page than make promises in a blog post.
Less about us, more you can check. That’s the trade, and we think it’s the right one for this kind of software.