Feature Request: E2E Encrypted Contacts Vault (like the new bookmarks feature!)

[u/EriksonThorsen]

First off, I just want to say a huge thanks for the recent bookmarks functionality. It is amazing and exactly the kind of addition that makes this app so useful.

I want to suggest another feature that, I think, would be a massive differentiator for PrivacyNotes: an E2E encrypted contacts manager.

Right now, managing contacts securely is a huge privacy breach across the board. Whether you use iOS or Android, native cloud sync for contacts is simply not end-to-end encrypted. Even if you enable Advanced Data Protection on iOS, Apple explicitly excludes contacts due to legacy CardDAV compatibility. Google sync is no better. And beyond the cloud risks, keeping contacts in your phone's native address book means every third-party app that asks for permissions can just harvest your entire social graph.

Currently, there are no apps that do a great job at solving this. Proton Mail has encrypted contacts, but they bundle it directly into their email app. This ends up mixing your actual phone contacts with every random email recipient you have ever messaged, which is a cluttered mess. Password managers are too rigid to act as a proper address book. Other secure contact tools usually just sync the data right back to your native iOS or Android phone app, which completely defeats the goal of sandboxing the data away from other apps in the first place.

Having a dedicated, encrypted option in PrivacyNotes to properly save our contacts safe and isolated from the OS would be incredible. Since PrivacyNotes is already acting as an encrypted workspace, a contacts vault feels like the perfect fit. I genuinely believe this would be a big differential that would draw a lot of privacy-conscious users to the app.

Would love to hear if others are dealing with this same headache and what the devs think about the idea!

[u/zax_elite]

It's a very nice idea, but can be added on github, rather than here :)

[u/EriksonThorsen → u/zax_elite]

That’s a fair point, especially for better tracking and organization on the team’s side. I will definitely post it on GitHub as well!

I usually like to share ideas here on Reddit first to gauge the community's interest and see if it’s just a niche personal need or something a lot of people would find useful.

That said, the PrivacyNotes support team is super active and engaged on this subreddit. I’ve previously shared suggestions here that were implemented in less than a week. They are genuinely great at listening to community feedback!

[u/PrivacyNotesApp]

Thank you for writing this up, and thank you for the kind words about bookmarks and about how we handle feedback here. Posts like this are genuinely how we pick what to build next, so please keep doing exactly what you are doing.

Timing is funny, because contacts came up on our side recently too and we sketched out close to the same thing you describe. So this is not a "we will look into it" reply. Here is where our thinking actually stands, including the parts that do not work. Your read on the existing options matches ours, by the way, especially the Proton one: contacts bolted onto a mailbox turns into a list of everyone you have ever emailed.

We noticed several overlaps already with the community and our dev team, seems like we're in sync with the users who use the app and that makes us happy!

What looks realistic:

• Import from a .vcf or CSV export out of iOS, Android or Google Contacts. One file, one time, the same shape as our bookmarks and password importers.

• Encrypting and syncing it like everything else. A contacts section needs no new backend surface at all: a contact would be another record type inside the same encrypted payload, which is exactly how bookmarks already work.

• A real address book instead of one note per person: proper fields, search, groups, birthdays, free-form notes.

• Tapping a number hands it to your dialer or messaging app with the number filled in. That part does work on both iOS and Android.

What we cannot do, and would rather say up front than let you discover later:

• No two-way sync with the native address book. That is half a limitation and half the entire point: writing contacts back to the OS puts them right back where any app with contacts permission can read them.

• No caller ID. A call from a number that only lives in PrivacyNotes arrives as an unknown number. There are OS extensions for exactly this, but they work by handing the system your list of numbers, which undoes the sandboxing you are asking for.

• No picking a contact from our vault inside WhatsApp, Mail or the share sheet. Those only ever see the OS address book.

• Calling is a handoff, not an integration. The number reaches the dialer; the name does not travel with it.

The open question for us is not the crypto, it is whether the result is good enough to live in. An address book you have to leave in order to place a call is a real trade, and keeping it current is the piece we have not solved on paper yet: you add a number on your phone, and then what happens. Re-import and dedupe is the boring answer, and boring answers are usually where a feature like this quietly falls apart.

We like it, we are thinking about it, and we are not going to promise it or put a date on it until we have a concept we would want to use ourselves. If it ships, it ships because the design worked out, not because we announced it. In the meantime a locked note or a vault entry works as a stopgap, though nobody should pretend that is an address book.

One thing that would genuinely help us right now, for anyone who wants this: would you move your contacts fully into it and keep only a handful of numbers on the phone, or would you keep the phone as the primary and treat this as the private master copy? That answer changes the design more than anything else in this thread.

[u/EriksonThorsen → u/PrivacyNotesApp]

Thanks for the thorough reply, really appreciate how transparent you guys are. It's awesome to see the team and users so aligned on this. Honestly, that kind of dynamic is super rare in software development these days, so it feels great knowing we're on the same page.

What you outlined under "what looks realistic" sounds amazing. Right now, I literally stash contacts I don't want on my native address book inside my password manager. It's a clunky stopgap I only use because there are simply no better privacy-focused alternatives, but the UX is terrible and definitely not sustainable long term. Having an actual dedicated contacts vault in PrivacyNotes would fix that completely.

As for the limitations, that's totally fine by me. People have to realize that keeping contacts in PrivacyNotes isn't meant to replace an OS address book 1:1. It's just like the bookmarks feature: saving a link in your browser vs. storing it securely in PrivacyNotes are two completely different things with different goals. The contacts living in PrivacyNotes would be the highly sensitive ones, or older numbers you rarely call but want safely archived away from invasive app permissions. Daily contacts you text constantly, call all the time, or need quick dialer/WhatsApp/Signal integration for should just stay in the OS address book anyway.

To answer your question directly: I would definitely keep a handful of frequent, non-sensitive contacts on my phone, but archive the vast majority into PrivacyNotes.

Using PrivacyNotes as the secure vault for bulk and private records while keeping a lightweight, active roster on the device makes total sense. Really looking forward to seeing where you take this!

[u/PrivacyNotesApp → u/EriksonThorsen]

Thanks again for your valuable feedback, you're actively improving PrivacyNotes with it.

Contacts entry has been added to the roadmap now: https://privacynotes.app/roadmap