Standard Notes vs McAfee

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.

McAfee is a broad consumer security suite that necessarily collects significant data — including email content for AI scam detection, financial account login credentials for transaction monitoring, and SSN/credit card numbers for identity monitoring — and shares contact and commercial information with advertising partners; its CCPA transparency table is unusually specific and confirms browsing and network activity are not shared for advertising, the VPN explicitly avoids logging originating IPs or DNS queries, and CCPA request metrics are published, but the overall collection scope is extensive, retention is vague, and no security certifications are named in the main policy.