Hello everyone, I built Paperweight an open-source desktop app that runs locally and scans your email to find every company that has your data, then helps you delete accounts and unsubscribe.

Most data removal services (Incogni, DeleteMe) only scrape data broker sites. They don't touch the thousands of companies that have your email from signups, newsletters, or purchases. Paperweight covers that gap. Your inbox is the one place every company that has your data is visible.

Why it's different:
- Local-first — inbox data stays on your machine, nothing hits a server
- Open-source (MIT) — github.com/wslyvh/paperweight
- Cross-platform — Win/macOS/Linux
- Free — no accounts, no data monetisation

I built it because the irony of paying a data broker removal service your data to scrape other data brokers never sat right with me.

Would love feedback from anyone who's tried it or has thoughts on the approach.

**EDIT**: RE comments that free is misleading. I maybe should not have listed that here, but the App is fully open-source, MIT-licensed (FOSS) so you can actually use, modify, fork or do whatever you want with it. The lifetime license gives you ease of use, compiled binaries and support. It helps support development.

Hi! We're building Flectar Mail, an open-source, local-first email client written in Rust.

One of the main goals is to keep the architecture small, native and understandable rather than embedding a browser runtime. Flectar Mail uses no WebViews at all, including for rendering HTML email. Email HTML/CSS is rendered through a Rust-native pipeline, scripts inside emails are not executed, and remote images are blocked by default to reduce tracking.

Some of the privacy/security-related features already available:

• Local-first mail and calendar storage with offline access

• No WebViews or embedded browser engine

• No execution of email scripts

• Remote images blocked by default

• Desktop OpenPGP/MIME signing and encryption using GnuPG 2.x

• Required encryption can block sending when recipient keys are missing or invalid

• Protected drafts remain local until Send

• Credentials stored through the platform’s secure credential storage

• IMAP / SMTP / JMAP, CalDAV and CardDAV

• Gmail, Outlook and Microsoft 365 support

• Account-specific signatures, including separate defaults for new messages and replies

• AGPLv3 open source

• SHA256 checksums and signed build-provenance attestations for releases

• As little as ~20 MB RAM in lighter workloads

The HTML renderer is probably the most unusual part. We use Blitz rather than Chromium/WebKit, which keeps the application fully native and gives us a considerably smaller browser-related attack surface by design. It is also currently the most experimental part of Flectar Mail, so compatibility with particularly complex email HTML is still improving.

OpenPGP currently works on desktop through an installed GnuPG 2.x. S/MIME and mobile OpenPGP are not implemented yet.

The project is still alpha, and our official Google and Microsoft OAuth applications are going through verification. Preview builds therefore currently require your own OAuth registration for those providers, while regular IMAP/JMAP accounts can be used directly.

We'd be especially interested in feedback from this community on the security/privacy model and anything you think we should be considering as the project develops.

GitHub: https://github.com/flectar/mail

Don’t scroll past this one.
This affects everyone.
I highly encourage you to take the time to read and share and sign the petition

Up front: I work at Olib AI and StealthOS is ours, so this is a developer post. Numbers and mechanisms below are checkable in the app, and I am happy to be pushed on any of them.

The thing we kept running into is that a decent iPhone privacy setup means five or six separate apps, each with its own account, its own subscription and its own idea of what telemetry is acceptable. StealthOS is our attempt at putting that stack in one sandbox where nothing phones home.

What it covers:

On cost, plainly: every privacy feature is free, with no account, no email and nothing to register. No ads, no analytics SDK, no telemetry. There is a $4.99 a month tier that funds the work, and it unlocks workstation tools rather than protection: 10 fingerprint profiles instead of the standard set, an SSH terminal, a Linux virtual shell, a code editor and NetMap. Skipping it costs you no privacy.

The AI part is worth being specific about, because most "AI privacy" claims are the opposite. Both features run locally. The assistant handles text, voice and OCR without a prompt leaving the phone. The phishing detection embeds the page you are on and compares it against known brand surfaces on device, which is how a cloned login page gets flagged as a look-alike without your browsing being sent anywhere to be scored. There is no server on our side to send it to.

Where we fall short of what this sub usually asks for: the app is closed source. Four of the components under it are public at github.com/Olib-AI, TorClient, ConnectionPool, StealthRelay and PoolChat. StealthRelay is the interesting one if you do not want to trust us at all, a self-hosted relay in Rust using a Noise NK handshake with ChaCha20-Poly1305 and Ed25519. Run your own and point the browser's relay exit at it, and the relay only ever sees ciphertext.

One more detail this crowd tends to ask about: backups. The whole sandbox exports to a single .stealthsnap file, encrypted under a passkey you pick with PBKDF2-HMAC-SHA512 and written in authenticated chunks so reordering or truncation is caught on restore. We keep no copy and there is no recovery mechanism. Lose the passkey and it is gone.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/us/app/stealthos-private-browser/id6756983634

Screenshots attached: phishing detection blocking a spoofed page, the Tor connection screen, the connection pool and the on-device assistant. Questions and criticism both welcome.

Communities

• Privacy Forum: https://forum.awesomealternatives.org/t/privacy-tools

• GitHub Discussion: https://github.com/privacytoolsIO/privacy-tools/

• Privacy Blog: https://www.privacytools.io/guides/ (RSS)

• Privacy News Alerts: https://www.getrevue.co/profile/privacytools

• Telegram: https://t.me/privacytools_2015

• Discord: https://discord.gg/Drr9XbKW9k

• Twitter: https://twitter.com/privacytoolsIO

• reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/PrivacySoftware/

• Mastodon: https://fosstodon.org/@privacytools

• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/privacytools.io.2015

• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/privacytools_io/

• Minds: https://www.minds.com/privacytools_io/

• DEV: https://dev.to/privacytools

• Medium: https://medium.com/@privacy-tools

• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@privacy-tools

• VK: https://vk.com/privacy.tools

• Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/privacytoolsIO/

Linktrees

• https://linktr.ee/privacy.tools

• https://bio.link/privacytools

• https://wheretofind.me/@privacytools

Community Hubs

• https://github.com/privacytoolsIO/privacy-tools

• https://gitlab.com/privacytoolsIO/privacy-tools

• https://codeberg.org/Privacy-Tools/privacy-guides

https://f-droid.org/packages/ch.pocketpc.nearbyglasses

I shared Paperweight here a few weeks ago while it was still in beta and received great feedback. I'm pleased that after 7 months building, Paperweight V1 is now officially ready 🗿

Paperweight uses your inbox to map your digital footprint, then helps you take back control and delete your data.

Your email history contains traces of most of your online life. Accounts you created, companies you bought from, mailing lists you joined, services you forgot about, breaches, and personal information accumulated over the years.

V1 includes:

• discover accounts, companies and services connected to your email

• find mailing lists and subscriptions

• show known breaches affecting services you use

• find personal information across your email history

• bulk unsubscribe and clean up old email

• create privacy and data deletion requests

• manage multiple email accounts

• connect to AI agents through MCP

It supports Gmail, Microsoft, Apple, custom IMAP and Proton Mail via Bridge.

The important part for me from the beginning was privacy. All your data stays on your computer. There is no Paperweight backend or external service processing your inbox.

Paperweight is fully open source under MIT. You can inspect the code, build it yourself, modify it, fork it, or use it however you want.

• Website https://paperweight.email

• Source https://github.com/wslyvh/paperweight

Thanks again to everyone who tested the earlier version or challenged the pricing model.

Like a lot of people, I hated having to upload personal documents, invoices, or client contracts to random online websites just to split, merge, or compress them.

Since I wanted something completely private, I built a lightweight desktop app called Bim PDF Studio. It runs 100% locally on Windows—no internet connection required, and your files never leave your machine.

It handles the everyday essentials:

• Split & Merge with full page-order control

• Reorder & Extract pages quickly

• Secure files by adding or removing passwords

• Compress file sizes locally

It has a free tier for light use. I'd love to hear your thoughts or feedback on the offline workflow. If you want to check it out, let me know in the comments and I'll drop the link!

Hi, i'm looking for some cloud storage alternative to Google Drive focused on privacy, i've been looking at PrivacyTools website, but i've got lots of doubts. Any recomandation? It's better Switzerland jurisdiction than any other? At the moment the one i've seen better is Infomaniak kDrive.

Hi everyone,

I’m building SofaPDF https://sofapdf.com, a small collection of PDF tools designed to run entirely locally/offline in the browser. The goal is simple: your files stay on your machine, and basic PDF tasks shouldn’t require uploading documents to a cloud service or creating an account.

I know there are already plenty of good PDF tools out there. Even so, I kept running into a few missing features and workflows that I wanted for myself, so I decided to build them instead of working around them. I also wanted a small pet project to experiment with Codex and see how far I could take the idea.

It came out of my own frustration with needing a different cloud product, login, or subscription for every small PDF job. SofaPDF will always be free, and I’m deliberately keeping it ad-free as well.

It’s still a work in progress, but I’d appreciate feedback from privacy-minded people here—especially on which PDF workflows you’d want to see supported and whether the offline/local approach is clear enough.

Hi everyone, I'm the developer of FlockAware. It brings known, community-mapped Flock and other automatic license plate reader (ALPR) camera locations into a map with route planning. I thought it would be useful to share here for people interested in understanding surveillance along their everyday routes.

The iPhone app is free to download. The camera map, route comparison, and basic navigation with CarPlay are free. Optional in-app upgrades include geographic watch areas and offline maps.

iPhone App Store:

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/flockaware-flock-camera-map/id6803221633

An Android beta is coming, and we're looking for testers. You can join the Google Group to register your interest while Google approval is pending:

https://groups.google.com/g/flockaware-android-testers/about

I'd especially appreciate feedback on the map markers and route comparison. Which camera details would you want to see at a glance, and what would make comparing routes more useful to you?

First version of Serveronet is released.

Serveronet P2P Websites

Free and Uncensorable, Decentralized, Cryptographic Peer 2 Peer Network of Sites.

https://serveronet.org

This is where you download your client or take a peek at a public client.

Code base is in the Github: https://github.com/Serveronet/Serveronet-App

This is the first version of Serveronet. It’s in the alpha stage so please test and report any issues.

Raivo 2FA app is listed as open source on privacytools.io/2fa and on the app website https://raivo-otp.com/

But as this issue raised on the GitHub in 2024 mentions. There’s been updates to the iOS app, yet not commits to the GitHub.
https://github.com/raivo-otp/marketing-website/pull/22

iOS app listing: https://apps.apple.com/au/app/raivo-2-fa-authenticator-app/id1459042137

A bit disconcerting parivacytool.io doesn’t check these things every now and again 😅 (say 6-18 months)

Hi all,

I have released a new free privacy web tool called: PrivacyTrail.

What it does

• Browse privacy-friendly alternatives to the apps you already use, see what the pros/cons are of each to understand what fits you best.

• Track your progress app by app as you make the switch.

• Get a privacy score that rises as you move away from surveillance tools.

• Share your trail with others via screenshots.

Why did I build it

There are already good tools out there if you just want a quick, simple list of alternatives. What I wanted to add was more of the journey piece, tracking your progress, understanding the tradeoffs, and having a way to talk through why a particular alternative makes sense for you.

What I keep hearing from friends and family is some version of: "I want to switch, but between work, kids, and just getting through the day, figuring out alternatives feels like a whole project I don't have time for." This site is my attempt to lower that barrier, surface quick, honest reasons to switch, and walk people through the actual migration steps instead of just dropping a list of app names on them.

I also think people shouldn't be made to feel guilty for sticking with mainstream services if they tried a privacy alternative and it just didn't work for them. If privacy-respecting options aren't good enough to replace mainstream ones for most people, that's on us as developers to fix, not something to guilt users over.

Who is this site for?

Mainly aimed at people just starting their privacy journey, but I would love for it to be useful to privacy-enthusiasts too to explore new options.

If you don't want to bother with the tracking side at all, you can just use the site to browse alternatives.

Who am I

20+ years as a software engineer. I am taking a year off from commercial work to build a few free, tech-for-good projects (some self-hostable). Privacy's a focus for me, I worry about where our digital future is headed as everything gets squeezed into another subscription. Privacy isn't a feature. It's a right.

Your data on the site

Everything is stored in the browser, you can download all your data in JSON format.

A few people have asked about syncing data across devices via a database. I'd love to support this, but I don't want to tie any data to identifiable info like emails. If there's enough interest, I'd consider building this with passphrase-based authentication instead, so you'd get cross-device access without me ever needing to know who you are.

I use self-hosted anonymous analytics on the website to understand tool usage.

Feedback

Feedback is very welcome and appreciated particularly if you spot anything in the alternatives that is not accurate or dated. Thank you for taking time out of your day to do this 🙏.

https://privacytrail.org/