Cloaked vs Standard Notes

Cloaked is a privacy-masking service with a strong mission, an 'encrypted even from us' architecture claim, and explicit commitments to never sell data, read emails, read texts, or listen to calls — but significant product complexity means multiple features are governed by third-party policies rather than Cloaked's own: the VPN is powered by PureVPN (and PureVPN's policy governs it), financial account connections use Plaid/Stripe/PayPal under their own policies, and the Inbox Cleaner requires Gmail access despite the high-profile 'never read your emails' pledge; additionally, it is a US company governed by Massachusetts law, no security certifications are named, data retention is vague, and it ignores Do Not Track signals.

Standard Notes is an end-to-end encrypted note-taking app that genuinely cannot read your notes; analytics are self-hosted via Plausible with no IP retention, apps collect zero usage data or location, and the subprocessor list is short and transparent — the main weaknesses are US jurisdiction and AWS hosting, the absence of published security audit reports, a thin policy that lacks GDPR rights language, and email marketing enabled by default.