A notes app for journalists that keeps your notes on your device

What matters for reporting notes

Interview notes, source names and half-finished leads are the material most worth protecting, and most notes apps keep a readable copy on the company’s servers. A copy the provider can read is a copy the provider can be asked to hand over.

Prevon is designed so that copy does not exist. Notes are encrypted on your device before they are stored, with a key made from your 12-word Recovery Seed. We never see the seed and never store it.

How it works in practice

• No account and no email address. Opening Prevon does not tie the notes to an identity on our side.
• Search works by meaning and runs on your device, so finding “the call about the leaked contract” does not send your notes to a search server.
• Moving to a new phone is a direct transfer over your own Wi-Fi with a QR or pairing code — no cloud relay in between.
• Wiping the vault destroys the key, which turns every stored copy of your notes into unreadable data at once. How that works.

Where the protection stops

Prevon is in a private beta and has not had an independent security audit. It is designed so that we cannot read your notes, but “designed” is the honest word until someone outside the company has checked it.

Encryption protects a locked vault. If your device is unlocked and in someone else’s hands, or running spyware, the notes on screen are readable — that is true of every encrypted app.

Prevon is a notes app, not a secure messenger. It does not replace Signal or SecureDrop for talking to sources, and there is no sharing or collaboration in the beta.