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Show HN: Neucards – Privacy based digital contact card

by bdominy on 5/16/23, 5:00 PM with 36 comments

Neucards is an end-to-end encrypted contact information sharing and updating iOS app that protects your identity while letting you keep in touch with people. I started working on neucards as a side project more than ten years ago, and I decided three years ago to go full-time and try to build a community around it.

There are two major problems that neucards addresses. First, most people end up with contact lists that are hopelessly out of date. Over time, people move, change jobs, or add social profiles and unless they tell you, chances are you could lose touch. Second, your contact information ends up in the wrong hands. There has been a huge increase in robocalls, unsolicited emails, data breaches, and online scams that is driven by accessing a person's contact info. Even worse, with AI now being able to imitate a person's voice or other mannerisms, knowledge about the connections you have with others can be used against you.

Neucards automatically updates your contact information for anyone who has your digital contact card. You control your contact information and who has access. This is possible because of end-to-end encryption. Neucards brings the same level of protection for your contact information as Signal or WhatsApp does for your chats. Privacy is built it.

But, even with these protections, you can share your contact info with anyone. As an example, here is a link to my Social card:

https://www.neucards.com/of/braddominy?id=M6TC5PLngD&k=4R98i...

I'm excited about how much neucards has grown and what I have planned for the future to do even more to protect people's privacy. If you have any comments, please let me know.

Brad https://www.neucards.com

  • by wkat4242 on 5/16/23, 8:54 PM

    Nice idea but without worldwide availability and and Android version there's no chance for it.

    Here in Spain Android is about 70% of the mobile market.

    But nice idea in general. It would also be nice to be able to unshare or blacklist contacts (like pushy sales guys that keep bothering me for stuff I have nothing to do with)

  • by prophesi on 5/16/23, 8:05 PM

    Any chance of opening the source? I'm a bit confused how it could be E2E-encrypted if the URL doesn't have a URI fragment. This is usually where the key would be located, as the URI fragment isn't sent to the server unless there's malicious code doing otherwise.

  • by alaskamiller on 5/16/23, 7:16 PM

    Another old timer Yahoo engineer showed me something like this at a cupertino coffee shop a few years back but with like half the features ready but the enthusiasm is there so I guess vcf sharing is a pretty deep idea. The headline, sub, and intro copy can do with simple jargons. The nfc cards/stickers are a good incremental add on. Good luck!

  • by RileyJames on 5/16/23, 10:14 PM

    I like the idea behind this.

    My concerns with using it are that the app itself languishes, or doesn’t get traction.

    Is there any capacity to use a neucard with a recipient that doesn’t have the app?

    Are there any plans to open this up to alternative clients / implementations?

    Are there parts you can open source while maintaining a business around some portions of the product? (Such as the physical cards)

  • by smoldesu on 5/16/23, 9:53 PM

    This looks cool. Unfortunately, I can get 99% of the way there with a regular NFC tag that has my contact info and a link to my website. Doing that, I can link to my own website and keep everything up-to-date and I don't need to trust others for security.

    With all that in mind, I think your actual product is kinda thin and easy to disrupt. I wish you luck (I'm surprised more people don't use NFC business cards) but I'm not sure about your staying power with the current iteration.

  • by c7DJTLrn on 5/17/23, 2:51 PM

    It's cool, does it work without the app? And does the card have a QR code printed on it?

    I'd really like to exchange contact info when meeting new people more easily. It's always a negotiation of "do you have this app?" "no but I have this app" "ah I don't have that app, do you have this" "no, but I can give you my number". If they can scan a QR code and get all my info without needing to install anything, that sounds great.

    Actually quite surprised Apple doesn't have a feature to exchange info on your own contact via NFC.

  • by bdominy on 5/16/23, 8:59 PM

    Also, I was recently on the Shifting Privacy Left podcast hosted by Debra Farber discussing Neucards and privacy in general. You can listen at https://shiftingprivacyleft.buzzsprout.com/2059470/12853299-...

  • by arran-nz on 5/17/23, 12:54 PM

    I made Qcard which makes solves a similar problem using client-side JS to decode the standard VCard format - It's free and open source.

    - https://qcard.link

  • by _1tan on 5/16/23, 8:00 PM

    Cool! Is the app restricted to certain regions at the moment? Unable to download from a EU-country.

  • by throwaway290 on 5/16/23, 7:58 PM

    > prestine

    If you could do with a proofreader for site copy, I know some people who might be happy to help.

  • by twobitshifter on 5/16/23, 11:50 PM

    At conferences people often have screenshots of nfcs that point to their LinkedIn profiles.