People usually put pretty intimate private thoughts in diaries so I'm curious how your app handles preserving each user's privacy. Are files encrypted or only stored on a user's local machine or something?
People usually put pretty intimate private thoughts in diaries so I'm curious how your app handles preserving each user's privacy. Are files encrypted or only stored on a user's local machine or something?
There are two cases:
Self-hosted: your data lives entirely on your own machine/server and obviously I never see it. That's the primary privacy model the app is designed around.
piruet.app (my hosted instance): you're basically trusting me. (I know, trusting a random stranger on the internet... right?)
Other things I can tell you: Passwords are bcrypt-hashed and I can't recover them, but journal entries are stored in a SQLite database on the server. There's no at-rest encryption of content, so in principle the server's administrator could access the entries. I don't do it on principle and there's no infrastructure set up to do so, but I can't make a technical guarantee of that.
If you just don't trust the person hosting it, I'd honestly recommend self-hosting yourself.
At-rest encryption of entries is something I'd like to add, it's just not there yet. In the meantime, piruet.app is best treated as a demo/trial environment rather than a permanent home for sensitive writing.
If you have thoughts on how to approach encryption in a way that doesn't break usability (search, rich text, etc.) I'd genuinely love to hear them.