Writerise 5 - Privacy

This is part 5 of the series on developing Writerise, a mac application to automatically track how much you write each day:

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3
• Part 4
• Part 5 - This Article

I haven’t written about Writerise in a long while. I’m still running it myself daily. I’ve been really busy with freelance work and didn’t have the time to work on it in these last few months. It is currently feature complete, but has a few rough edges and lot of polishing to do. You can join the private alpha by joining my newsletter

Privacy is of the most importance to me. It is the first concern I had when I got the idea for the app. It needs to respect user’s privacy. It is the first topic I think about when planning a new feature or an implementation for WriteRise.

Writing opens up your soul and lets it flow into the page (or in this case a digital document).

What you write is one of the most personal things to you. It’s even more private than knowing what specific app you’re using on a specific date and time.

Everything stored in the app is saved in an encrypted database using a random key generated at the first launch of the application and stored in the mac’s keychain. This way the data stays safe and not even I can decrypt it even if I wanted to (I don’t). ¹

On the other hand this means that if you switch machine or clear your keychain you will lose access to all the history saved up to that point and you will need to start from a clean slate. I feel that this minimal annoyance is the right price to pay for the added security.