Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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Paperweight scans your inbox to map your digital footprint, then helps you take back control and delete your data. Local-first and open source. (github.com)

submitted 1 day ago by wslyvh@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

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I’m excited to introduce Paperweight, a local-first open-source desktop app I’ve been building to help people understand and reduce their digital footprint.

Your inbox is a paper trail of every company that has ever had your data. Every account you created, every service you tried, every online purchase. It’s all connected to your email. Most people have 100+ accounts they’ve forgotten about, each a potential security, or privacy risk. For me the final push was the Odido data breach in the Netherlands. I hadn’t been a customer for more than 8 years, but all my data was still in their systems.

What it does:

Account inventory — Maps every company that has ever emailed you, with risks classifications and recommendations for action.
Bulk unsubscribe — Find and unsubscribe from any marketing and mailing lists (auto RFC 8058 where supported).
Breach alerts — Alerts when any company you’ve been in contact with has been breached (via HaveIBeenPwned).
GDPR requests — Generates pre-filled GDPR requests in multiple languages.

Supports Gmail, Outlook, Apple Mail, Proton (via Bridge) and any other email provider via IMAP.

Privacy approach:

Everything runs on your machine. Email content, credentials, and connection details never leave your device. No telemetry, no cloud sync, no analytics. The code is fully open source and auditable on GitHub.

Most alternatives in this space all require your to share your data through their services. Some of them have actually been caught selling your data. Paperweight is the only tool I’m aware of that does this entirely local and is open-source.

Website

https://www.paperweight.email/

Feedback welcome! Thanks

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[–] wslyvh@lemmy.ml 1 points 3 hours ago

Migrating 20+ year inboxes are definitely a pain. I did it a while ago, and tried to stay on top of it better since. As said below, never fully delete an old-email address. Others might be able to hijack the old account and impersonate you. Use a custom domain so you can easily switch providers if ever needed. A catch-all or aliases work great, but check if it allows to send from it. Especially for verification (e.g. delete an account) you often need to verify or send from the origin email. I stopped unique addresses per website. I'd keep a few just to separate "official" things, from general use/registration, and stuff I don't trust.

Paperweight sort of gives you an overview of services, but I'd recommend to do this more gradually otherwise you'd probably go crazy. Whenever you sign up, check your email and change to one of the addresses above. After a year or so, you likely have done most important once (that at least require you to login). You could probably just keep the others as is, with your old email for legacy. But only use the new address(es) moving forward.

Hope that helps!