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Show HN: Neucards – Privacy based digital contact card (neucards.com)

51 points by bdominy ↗ HN
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 First, most people end up with contact lists that are hopelessly out of date.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

36 comments

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alaskamiller
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!
bdominy
Thank you! Contacts sharing and updating has had a lot of takes over the years. I remember Plaxo and Bump, back in the day. I'm hoping adding a privacy focus will help people feel more comfortable sharing better information and improving their connections.
alaskamiller
A la Google wave circle sharing. I think the lesson from that war was that humans inherently are bad at pre-judging their own relationships. But now we're in the LLM era so I would hope it would be automated for me.
throwaway290
> prestine

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

bdominy
Thanks! Good catch! I could use all the help I can get :)
_1tan
Cool! Is the app restricted to certain regions at the moment? Unable to download from a EU-country.
bdominy
Unfortunately, it is restricted to the US App Store due to there being a higher compliance necessary for using encryption in Europe and other countries outside the US. Once I get some traction, I'm planning to release it everywhere.
denton-scratch
> higher compliance necessary for using encryption in Europe

Excuse me? What are you referring to? I'm in Europe (UK), I use encryption routinely, and if I have a compliance obligation I didn't know about, I'd be grateful if you'd point it out to me.

bdominy
Sorry. I mean Apple adds steps to releasing an app outside the US if it uses encryption. I'm doing neucards as a solo effort and am hoping to see some traction before taking on those requirements. Here is a link to Apple's policy

https://developer.apple.com/documentation/security/complying...

mschuster91
And here I thought that the days of encryption being classified under ITAR were over for decades. Apparently I was wrong, or Apple insists on over-compliance...
er4hn
It's very much not over. It tends to focus on novel algorithms and dedicated hardware equipment so it's not as "in your face" as it once was.
RileyJames
Same deal, would love access in AU/NZ
prophesi
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.
bdominy
For card links, I'm using a one time key to protect the information stored on my server. The end-to-end encryption works when you exchange cards using the Neucards app with another Neucards user. It's a tricky situation because people won't use it if it isn't able to quickly exchange contact info like a vcard or other digital cards. The goal was to make sure nothing could be read by a third party without the user giving them access. As for opening the source, I'm going to wait and see. I understand the need for verification, but it is also difficult to make a living doing that.
pfg_
It looks like the web interface is not E2E encrypted, the server decrypts the card info and sends that decrypted info to you.
wkat4242
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)

bdominy
100% agree. I'm hoping to add Android and other markets in the not too distant future. As for unsharing, that's possible by removing a recipient and I have plans to help even more in the scenario you describe.
twobitshifter
Eh, why does an app need to serve the entire world to have any chance? Snapchat was iOS only for the longest time.
wkat4242
Because it's an app used to share contact details. If more than half the people can't use it (and the people that can will not have a 100% uptake) there isn't much point in using it. It'll be a novelty for that one time you find someone you can actually use it with.

And Snapchat is one of many messaging apps. Personally I've never used it and I have 6 different chat apps on my phone :) This thing is a really new idea and it only really works if it becomes a standard. People are not going to carry 6 different contact card sharing apps because it'll be a mess.

smoldesu
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.

bdominy
You may be right. It isn't easy to convince people to try something new. As for your website contact info link, how do you tell people that have the link to revisit it when you've made a change?
RileyJames
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)

bdominy
Thank you! I'm glad you like the idea.

For sharing with others who don't have the app, the link you send lets them see your card's contact information on the neucards' website which they can act on. So, for example, I typically share my phone number, linked in profile, twitter handle, etc. and that works faster for me than just giving someone my number and texting them the rest. Also, by using card types, you can set up multiple cards (Professional, Personal, Friends, Minimal, etc.) and then have more control over what info you share initially.

I'm very much hoping to add Android and making neucards as universal as possible. Open sourcing would definitely help with that, but I'm taking a wait and see approach. The physical nfc tags were just added and if people embrace them, then it would make that approach more viable.

bdominy
BTW, I wrote about my experience creating the NFC tags at IndieHackers - https://www.indiehackers.com/post/shipped-my-first-order-tod...
jaclaz
If I get this right, both the NFC tag and the app assume that these two conditions are true:

1) internet connection is available

2) that the neucard site is up and working

so it is in some ways an IOT of sorts, right?

For the NFC those two conditions are of course needed, but for the app, is there a "local cache" of contacts in case either of the two conditions are not met?

Or are these contacts automatically added[1] to the phone contacts?

And how does the updating works?

I mean, does the app "phone home" periodically or only when you ask for a given contact (or both)?

[1] even if in a possibly outdated version

bdominy
Yes, for the NFC tags you will need an internet connection, but the Neucards app does maintain a local cache of the digital cards you have received. You can view the details of those cards and kick off an action, like make a call or send an email, by just tapping on the info. Updates occur when I edit my card or account information and notifications are sent to the list of recipients for my card. Neucards does a sync at launch or when triggered by a notification.

As for adding info to the phone contacts, this is a tricky situation. Right now, I do not sync the contact info from received cards into the contacts on the phone. This is because the contacts on the phone are a shared resource that other apps can access, and I don't want people's contact info to leak. I do support caller identification, so you will see a person's name rather than just a number when they call for all of the numbers on your received cards. But, this isn't as robust of an experience as having all the info in the phone's contacts.

jaclaz
I understand how you don't want the contacts coming from neucard into the generic phone app, but then users wanting to call someone must know if the contact is in the neucard app or in the standard phone one (or look in both).

Maybe you could do the reverse, i.e. somehow allow the neucard app to "import" the standard contacts, if this would be possible, the neucard app could double as a "private contacts app" that might have more general use.

bdominy
Actually, I have an option in Neucards' settings that adds a Contacts tab which lets you access your phone's contacts directly within Neucards. I agree people should not need to go back and forth to find what they are looking for.
twobitshifter
At conferences people often have screenshots of nfcs that point to their LinkedIn profiles.
bdominy
Yes. LinkedIn is, in my experience, the go to way of connecting at conferences. I should mention, though, that one feature I really like myself in Neucards is location tagging when you exchange your digital card. This lets me see months later not just when, but also where, I met someone and makes it much easier to remember the context around the exchange.
arran-nz
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

bdominy
That looks very useful! I like your focus on privacy. Thanks for sharing.
c7DJTLrn
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.

bdominy
It does work without the app. You can display a QR code on your phone's screen to let people see and act on your contact info even if they don't have Neucards installed. In fact, I use my wife's android phone all the time for testing. You can also set up card types to just share certain info, like professional, personal, family, friends, etc.

The tap cards do not have a QR code printed on them because I create an access key dynamically when you activate the tap card.