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Hacker News - Newest: ""surveillance" "privacy""

+[2026-06-08 14:30] Foxlore – subscription-free notes app with powerful search, genuine privacy

We are a very small team of indie researchers/developers building Foxlore, a macOS/iOS note-taking app (Markdown and LaTeX for math) that is designed with the following core values in mind:

- Notes stay on your devices (with optional iCloud sync), not on any servers you don't control - Powerful search functionality over note content and its attachments (including photos, Voice Memos recordings, PDFs, Calendar events, Maps pins) using on-device AI models only - Subscriptions-free: at launch, users purchase the app once and own all current and future features across platforms.

We're close to launch and are looking for beta testers for the macOS version and would really appreciate honest feedback from those of you who use apps like Evernote, Apple Notes, Bear, Obsidian, or Notion.

Link to TestFlight: https://testflight.apple.com/join/Aw82UeKQ

Link to our minimal website with app's screenshots: https://foxlore.app

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48445917

Points: 4

# Comments: 1

 [2026-06-07 14:04] Ask HN: Is it feasible to run a model on device for complete privacy?

Tried Gemma, Qwen and a few others. Need vision and larger context windows for an application I am working on. Results were quite poor Gemma 4E2B probably the best of the ones I tired but still fell apart and keep hallucinating with ~5000 tokens. Cloud based models had no problems even even Gemini 3.1 Flash-Lite and GPT-5.4 mini do a lot better and a way faster.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48434992

Points: 3

# Comments: 6

 [2026-06-05 22:17] Show HN: Honest Privacy Policies – We Read the Fine Print So You Don't Have To

Hi HN, I’m Aseem

Last month, during my commencement for a Master's in Privacy Engineering at CMU, my friends and I were joking about the absurd volume of unreadable privacy policies we’d spent semesters dissecting. What started as a graduation joke stuck with me, and over the last few weeks, it transformed into this actual project.

I’m personally very privacy-conscious—I self-host my NAS, run Immich for my photos, and try to self-host where I can. But completely decoupling from third-party services is nearly impossible. Even with a technical background in privacy and security, figuring out what a SaaS tool actually does with your data telemetry means wading through buried boilerplate that no one has time to read.

I built HonestPrivacyPolicies.org to turn that text into structured, actionable insights.

Would love your feedback. A few questions I've been asking ppl : 1. What would you love to see in a privacy policy (check our pp as well) 2. What questions do you want answers to when you give your data to an org

Cheers!

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48419076

Points: 5

# Comments: 4

 [2026-06-04 21:36] Being privacy-conscious comes with some downsides

I just uninstalled Pi-hole. It kind of ruined a little bit of my life.

I had a very time-sensitive and bureaucratic thing to do. It involved making an appointment. I've been trying to find an available slot multiple times a day for months. I was frustrated and desperate.

It's one of those highly bureaucratic, annoying processes. The support team is horrible, and I was completely stuck.

After trying every combination of browsers, turning off extensions and devices I could think of, I eventually missed the deadline. Then I randomly checked the site on my phone yesterday, and it was working. There were appointment slots available (even though it didn't help me anymore).

I tore my hair out trying to figure out what had happened.

Apparently, the site relied on some trackers, and data from those trackers was used to send the visitor's location as part of the form request. Bad engineering, for sure. But whatever the reason, I never figured it out because I disabled browser extensions, switched browsers, and tested different devices but I was always using the pihole DNS.

The whole architecture of Pi-hole is "set it and forget it"—and I forgot it was even there.

The modern web relies on countless systems that interfere with your privacy. The more privacy-conscious you become, the more you end up hurting your own internet experience. Some people block JavaScript, block everything, or use Tor exclusively. I sometimes feel like those folks end up with a more miserable life at a cost of a secure one.

I think drawing the line at an ad blocker extension is enough. We're cooked when it comes to privacy. The framework of the modern web is basically: consent or exit. There isn't much room for anything else.

Maybe I'm stupid. Maybe I should have figured this out sooner. But I think being part of the mainstream internet probably gives you a slightly more frictionless experience than being highly privacy-conscious ever will.

Comments URL: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48404963

Points: 9

# Comments: 4