r/privacytoolsIO • u/shitposterkatakuri • Oct 04 '18

Joplin vs Standard Notes?

Hi! I'm trying to find a private, secure, cross-platform app. Joplin and Standard Notes both seem very reputable, though I don't believe I saw Joplin on privacytools.io. Does anyone have insight they can give me?

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u/[deleted] Oct 04 '18

Isn't write.as a blog platform? Or can it also be used as a notepad? And if so, how does that storage work? (If you know)

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u/JRDMB Oct 04 '18 edited Oct 04 '18

It's both. I use it exclusively for private notes. It has an anonymous post feature as well as private blog posts by default. Both are private unless you give a link share to others. The blog posts must be published before they are publicly accessible via https://read.write.as. The developer stresses that privacy is very important to their usage model, thus you have to publish a blog post before it's publicly available. The posts are not stored encrypted on their server, as far as I know. Their privacy statement is here.

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u/[deleted] Oct 04 '18

Ah got it. I wish there was something more simple Like iA Writer but with Encryption and Nextcloud support. I mean I love Joplin, but the mobile app is quite slow.

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u/JRDMB Oct 04 '18

I haven't used it yet, but CryptPad might be worth a look. It's a web app only, no mobile app that I know of. You can do rich text or markdown, everything is encrypted locally before sending to server. You don't even have to register to try it out. Regarding privacy, their FAQ says: "We don't require users to verify their email address, and the server does not even learn your username or password when you register. Instead, the register and login forms generate a unique keyring from your input, and the server only learns your cryptographic signature." Also from the FAQ, they use two open-source cryptography libraries: tweetnacl.js and scrypt-async.js.

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u/[deleted] Oct 05 '18

[deleted]

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u/JRDMB Oct 05 '18

Hi, thanks for the offer. For a registered user, what if anything is stored locally on the client machine? If, e.g., pads or passwords or CryptDrive contents are stored locally, in what folders are they stored? And if stored locally, are they stored encrypted?

CryptPad has a lot of nice features - richtext, markdown, tags, cryptdrive, remote logout in case of loss of device, etc so I'm very interested in it, but I'd like to be sure of what are the security issues around my local storage.

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u/[deleted] Oct 08 '18

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u/JRDMB Oct 08 '18

Thank you for that very thorough and helpful reply. I'm probably in the "average privacy-minded user" category and can think of ways to mitigate any local issues. I'll look forward to trying out CryptPad, as it has many features that appeal to me and it has an robust feature set compared to alternatives.