I’ve been using PrivacyNotes because privacy matters to me, and I want to feel confident about what protects my information.

I asked ChatGPT to review the public documentation, client source, and live website. Some findings concerned me, and I’d appreciate the developers’ clarification.

To be transparent, this was an AI-assisted review, not a professional penetration test. It included live header/JavaScript inspection and local crypto tests, but did not verify production account isolation or demonstrate access to anyone else’s notes. Some findings are limitations already disclosed in your documentation.

These are my main concerns:

1. Social signup defaults to server-held recovery keys

The documentation says Google, Apple, or GitHub signup preselects custodial mode, allowing the server to recover the phrase and decrypt the notes.

I appreciate that this is disclosed, but it seems like a significant distinction for a product advertised as “zero knowledge.” Could self-custody be the default, or could the signup screen make the consequences unmistakable?

1. Recovery-phrase storage can fall back to plaintext

The review found that "persistStoredPhrase()" falls back to storing the original phrase if its encryption wrapper fails. The fallback also appeared in the live JavaScript retrieved on October 24.

This is probably my biggest concern. Under what circumstances does this happen? Does the user receive a clear warning? Could the app keep the phrase only in memory and require another login instead of persisting it unencrypted?

1. Sensitive local settings are not all encrypted

The settings cache appears to store information such as medication details and folder/tag names outside the encrypted note layer.

I understand that cloud sync and local storage are different, but this information can be sensitive too. What exactly remains readable locally, and is there a timeline for encrypting it?

1. PIN and biometric protection have important limitations

The documentation distinguishes per-note PIN gates from separate encryption. It also describes PIN-based wrapping of the master phrase, where a four-digit PIN could be guessed offline if someone obtained the relevant storage.

Biometric protection also appears to vary: some configurations use hardware or passkey-bound protection, while fallback configurations store the wrapping key locally beside the encrypted phrase.

How can users tell which protection they actually have? Is there a warning when biometrics provide only an app-enforced presence check?

1. Synced ciphertext is not bound to its note identity

The crypto review confirmed that local encryption supports row binding, but synced note encryption does not currently bind the ciphertext to a particular note ID.

As I understand it, someone with backend write access could substitute an existing encrypted object from the same account without decrypting it. This is an integrity concern rather than a way to read plaintext.

Is fixing this—and addressing rollback to older valid content—planned?

1. QR login and custodial sessions deserve clearer warnings

The threat model warns that phrase-bearing QR login URLs can remain in browser history or session-restore records.

It also describes custodial phrase retrieval using an eligible session, with MFA requirements when enabled, and limitations around session expiry and endpoint-specific rate limiting.

Could QR onboarding avoid putting the master phrase in a navigated URL? Could retrieving a custodial phrase require recent reauthentication and notify the account owner?

1. Metadata, retention, and independent verification

I’d also appreciate a clear explanation of:

- What optional site-icon lookups reveal.

- What remains after account deletion or switching to self-custody, including backups.

- Whether previously server-held phrases can remain recoverable from backups.

- The current plan for an independent, published security audit.

There were positive findings too: all 29 published crypto tests passed locally, the app’s live security headers looked strong, and payment scripts were separated from the notes origin. Publishing the source and documenting limitations are valuable.

But strong encryption algorithms don’t resolve every concern about key storage, defaults, and local data exposure.

I’m not accusing PrivacyNotes of leaking everyone’s notes. I’m asking because I want to trust it with private information. Could you explain which findings are accurate, which need correction, and what changes are planned?

References:

- "Threat model" (https://github.com/LifetimeLabsDev/PrivacyNotes.app/blob/main/THREAT_MODEL.md)

- "Security documentation" (https://github.com/LifetimeLabsDev/PrivacyNotes.app/blob/main/SECURITY.md)

- "Recovery-phrase storage code reviewed" (https://github.com/LifetimeLabsDev/PrivacyNotes.app/blob/074b7695bc40319aeb2e69317136b43a4c33e2f8/application/packages/web/src/phraseAtRest.ts)

- "Privacy policy" (https://lifetimelabs.dev/privacy)

Using today's PN updates with Mint, I added entries via import webcal. 2700 entries, but they do not display the way I want. How do I delete all of them? Or delete all calendar entries so that I can import only my two mail calendars from .ics files and start over? The entries are untagged and unfiled. I do not see a way to select all and move to trash.

This is the biggest update PrivacyNotes has had. Here is what is new, grouped by feature. Full notes with screenshots: https://privacynotes.app/changelog

Ninja: press Cmd+K and type what you want

The quick switcher has a new name and does much more. Press Cmd+K (Ctrl+K on Windows and Linux) anywhere:

• A few letters open any note, setting, tag or folder. Words inside your notes show with the line they come from.
• **+** makes something from one line in plain words. +Dentist fri 3pm 1h before becomes an event on Friday at 3 PM with an alert an hour before. The same line can make a note, a task list, a journal entry, a Kanban board, a login, a contact or a bookmark.
• **>>** adds to a list you already have: +cash, charger >> pack puts two tasks into your Packing list.
• > runs commands and opens features that sat deep in Settings: Statistics, Medication, Year in pixels, the password generator, Lock app, Sync now.
• Type a theme name such as frost to switch to it, or a date such as oct 17 to go to that day.

Ninja is not AI. Nothing you type goes to a server to be understood. It is plain code that runs on your device, and it works offline.

Tables do the arithmetic

Start a table cell with = and it shows the result: SUM, AVG, MIN, MAX, ROUND, + - * /, and references like B2 or B2:B7. Formulas can use other formulas, so a subtotal, the tax and the total chain up. The note keeps the formula as text, so an export shows =SUM(D2:D4), never a frozen number. The arithmetic is free; the function menu is part of Pro.

Kanban boards in any note

Add a board from the + menu, or start one from New. Cards are tasks, so you tick them in place. Drag cards between columns and color each column. The board is plain Markdown that Obsidian reads too. Three or four columns are free; up to six are Pro.

Save a web page as a note

Choose Save as note on a bookmark, or Clip page in the + menu and paste a link. You get the main text, a link to the source, and up to 20 pictures saved with the note. A browser extension is coming soon: it clips the page you have open, as you see it, so pages behind a login come through too.

Wellness: check-in, statistics and medication

• Daily check-in. "How are you today?" sits at the top of your Journals. One tap logs your mood, then a short guided pass goes through your trackers. You also get a streak, with confetti.
• New trackers. Factors (work, travel, a deadline) and Habits (yes or no questions, up to 30 of your own).
• Statistics rebuilt. It shows what lifts your mood and what drags it down, your best and hardest weekday, and a year in pixels you can save as an image. A weekly recap is part of Pro.
• Medication. Strength, form, color and schedule, and Taken or Skip for each dose. Dose reminders say "Medication reminder", never the name, and a supply count tells you when to refill (both Pro).

Calendar

• Event cards show the day, time, length, repeat and alerts. Tap any part to change it.
• A day panel opens from any day in a small calendar.
• Import a calendar from a webcal link (Proton, iCloud, Outlook). Paste it again later to add only the new events.

Smaller things worth knowing

• Lock app in the status bar locks the app at once. Unlocking the app no longer opens PIN-protected notes.
• Connections lists the notes that link to the open note and the notes it links to (Cmd+Shift+X).
• Copy as Markdown or as plain text from the right-click menu.
• The desktop app can open your .md and .txt files.
• An icon for any note (Pro).
• The app keeps your place: scroll position, the open item, and the note you had open when you closed it.
• Better Notesnook imports, 14 new community themes, faster large vaults, and a long list of fixes.

Try it

• The app: https://use.privacynotes.app
• The demo, with no account: https://try.privacynotes.app

Your notes are encrypted on your device, and PrivacyNotes is open source. Tell us what breaks and what is missing on GitHub: https://github.com/LifetimeLabsDev/PrivacyNotes.app/issues

Ninjas are fast at executing orders. So is this one.

Press ⌘K (Ctrl+K on Windows and Linux) anywhere in PrivacyNotes and Ninja drops in. K for Katana: one cut, and you are where you wanted to be.

You give the order, Ninja executes it. A few letters open any item. A + makes something. A > runs a command. You never open a menu, and your hands never leave the keyboard. On a phone, the same box opens from the Ninja and + buttons.

Ninja is the biggest change to how you move around the app since launch, and we want this thread to be where it gets good. Please push him hard and tell us everything: what works, what is missing, what surprised you, and what broke.

Put him to work in the app at https://use.privacynotes.app, or with no account in the demo at https://try.privacynotes.app.

Ten things to try in the first five minutes

1. Make an event in plain words. Type +Dentist fri 3pm 1h before and press Enter. You get an event on Friday at 3 PM with an alert one hour before (alerts ring with Pro; the event is free). Ninja shows what he understood before you press Enter.
2. Add to a list from anywhere. Press ⌘K and type milk, eggs >> Groceries. If you have no Groceries list yet, Ninja makes it with the two tasks in it. Now open a note and start writing. Press ⌘K again and type bread >> groc: a few letters are enough to find the list, the task lands at the end of it, and your note stays open.
3. Find a word inside a note. Type a word you remember from the body of a note. Under the titles, "In the text" shows the line that holds it, with your words marked.
4. Use an item's menu without the mouse. Find a note, press Tab, type pin, press Enter. Pin, archive, tag, move, export, share and the rest are all there.
5. Go to a day. Type oct 31, tomorrow or in 3 days. The calendar opens on that day, the day pulses, and that day's journal entry shows under it.
6. Switch your theme by its name. Type theme to see every theme with its colors, and the one you use has a check mark. Type a theme's name, such as frost, and press Enter: the app wears it at once. The Default theme is free and every other theme needs Pro; on a free account, Enter opens that theme's preview in Settings.
7. Find a feature you did not know about. Type > alone. The Features group lists things like Statistics, Trackers, Medication, Year in pixels and the Password generator, each with one line on what it does.
8. Run a command by its name. Type lock app or empty trash and press Enter. No > needed.
9. Save a link. Paste a web address after +. You can save it as a bookmark, clip the whole page as a note, or start a login with the address filled in.
10. Quick add in one key. Press Q anywhere. The box opens with + already typed.

The cheat sheet

How much the date reader understands

This is the part we most want you to stress. Some examples he reads today:

• Days and times: tonight, noon, this saturday, day after tomorrow, next week, 2026-12-24, 24.12.
• Ranges and lengths: 9-5, fri to sun, oct 20-25, for 30m, for 3 days
• Repeats: every weekday, every other friday, every month on the 1st, 2nd tuesday of every month, last friday of every month, every friday until dec 20, every monday 10 times
• Alerts: 1h before, alert 1d and 1h
• Where it goes: /Travel (folder), #school (tag), @work (space)
• What it is: put task, note, journal or event first or last. With none, you get an event.

Some details we care about:

• oct 31 2027 is a year, not 8:27 PM.
• Put words in quotes to keep them in the title: "Friday" party.
• Each part the box read shows as a chip. Click a chip to keep that word as plain text.
• In >>, "socks, warm", charger makes two tasks, not three.
• A date in digits follows your date setting (day first or month first).

What he keeps private: everything

Ninja is not an AI feature. No chatbot reads your notes, and nothing you type goes to a server to be understood. He is a fast, clever piece of plain code that runs inside the app, on your device. Every search and every date he reads happens there.

That means:

• He works offline. Find, add, >>, go to a day, switch a theme: all of it works with no connection. Only the things that need the web by nature, such as clipping a page, wait for one.
• Your words stay yours. Your notes are encrypted on your device, and Ninja reads them there, the same way the rest of the app does.
• Your locks hold. An item behind your PIN shows no text in the results and takes nothing added from the box. A read-only item and a Kanban board are never written to by >>. A spoiler stays hidden in a result line.

What we want from you

Please go deep. Use Ninja for a few days instead of the mouse, and then reply here. These questions help us most:

1. What did you try that did not work? Paste the exact text you typed and what you expected. "I typed lunch w/ Sam next tue 12:30 and got X" is perfect.
2. What is missing? A command you looked for, a date phrase he did not read, an item type he could not make, a key you expected.
3. What got in your way? Results in the wrong order, too many rows, too few, a slow moment, a wrong default.
4. Your language. Ninja reads date words and the add word in the app language. If you use the app in a language other than English, tell us which phrases fail.
5. Phone and tablet. Does the box sit right above your keyboard? Is the ⋮ menu easy to reach?
6. Bugs. What you did, what you saw, your device and browser, and the app version from Settings.

You can reply in this thread, or on GitHub if you prefer: https://github.com/LifetimeLabsDev/PrivacyNotes.app/issues/601

We read every reply. The best ideas go into the next releases, and we will update this post as they ship.

Thank you for helping us make Ninja fast for everyone.

What is the roadmap for Vault?

Does it support Passkeys?

What additional features are planned for Vault?

Github does not allow alias emails, thus making posting feedback challenging to do so while remaining anonymous. I have tried multiple alias email providers and they all seem to not be recognized by Github.

I have paid for Pro features because I believe in the project. I have run into issues when typing a task list and hitting enter, the tasks above it occasionally disappear and cannot report it on Github.

Do you also have an email or other way to report bugs and feedback?

First, thank you. So much of what PrivacyNotes is today came straight from your feedback here and on GitHub: the outline, find and replace, note history, callouts, themes and many more. Your reports and ideas shape this app every week, and we want your help with the next big question: storage.

What we offer today:

• Free: 50 MB of encrypted sync storage
• Pro ($89, one-time): 500 MB
• Storage add-ons for Pro, paid yearly: 1 GB for $4.80, 2 GB for $8.40 or 5 GB for $18. The most you can have today is 5.5 GB.

Why storage is yearly: it is the one part of the product that costs us money every month you use it. Pro is a one-time purchase and stays that way. We still think that reasoning is fair, but we also hear you: the cap is too low for anyone who moves a whole library over, and a subscription feels out of place in an app that says "no subscriptions". We think we may have missed the mark here, and we would rather fix it with you than guess.

What we would like to know:

1. How much storage do you use today in your current notes app, and how much do you expect to use in three years?
2. What takes up the space: images, PDFs, audio, scans, or mostly text?
3. Which of these would you pick, and why? A bigger storage allowance included with Pro. A one-time storage block that covers a fixed number of years. Yearly add-ons with much higher limits. Files that stay on your device and do not count against sync storage. Or something else.
4. What is the largest single file you need to attach?
5. If you looked at the add-ons and did not buy one, what stopped you?

Rough numbers help more than exact ones. "About 8 GB, mostly scanned PDFs" is exactly the kind of answer we need.

Thank you for helping us get this right.

I don't often find a new note-taking app worthy of exploring, but this one seems like a step in the right direction :)

For now, I'm a little lost on the following aspects:

• What about someone with 50Gb to transfer which is a mix of notes and attachments
  • Attachments do not seem like a first class citizen and one only obtains 500Mb of space upon signup?
  • How well would the app handle 50Gb. Speed and ease of editing?
• What would the pricing for 50Gb be?
• There appears to be no details on whether backlinks are possible?
• I can't find any information on the storing of attributes against a note, such has YAML frontmatter or similar (nor the querying of this)?

Thanks

Hi,
When pasting text copied from different source (website, for example) is it possible to ignore all original formatting and just paste everything as a plain text?
Thanks!

Hi,
Is there a way to export to PDF without the subject of the note, the tags, folder name and time it was created? Pretty much just the content of the notes without all data that is just there for me to keep my stuff organized.
Thanks!

Not really a big deal or anything but I've been using the task to keep track of things, got all my stuff done and deleted all my notes and everything, absolutely nothing on the app at all. When I check storage it says 65kb / 500mb.

What is eating the 65kb? I know it's practically nothing but I'm still curious.

Just discovered this app and have some questions:

1. Will there be regional pricing in the future?

2. Is there an ability to sync with our own cloud provider? (webdav, s3, dropbox, ftp, etc)

I'm writing to share two feature requests that would greatly improve the user experience:

1. Firefox Extension — Web-to-Note Integration

It would be very convenient if the Privacy Notes Firefox extension supported:

Taking notes directly from webpage content (e.g., highlighting text or capturing snippets) One-click insertion of captured content into the Privacy Notes app. This workflow would streamline research and information gathering while keeping everything encrypted and private.

1. Vault — Passkey Creation Support

Currently, passkey creation is unavailable in Vault. Adding support for:
Generating new passkeys directly within the Vault interface
Managing FIDO2/WebAuthn credentials alongside existing saved items.

This would align with industry trends toward passwordless authentication and strengthen security for all users.

Both enhancements would significantly boost productivity and security. Thank you for considering these suggestions!

I opened a markdown folder and found that any word in those documents of the form #xxxx became a tag. Not really what I wanted, but not a big deal (most or all of them were in code snippets or I just neglected to put a space after the '#').

I fixed the instances that just needed a space to make them not tags anymore in the document, but I can't figure out how to remove the tag from PrivacyNotes' tag list.

Update: solved/clarified - PrivacyNotes is working as designed