S2E18: Making Digital Contact Cards Private, Shareable & Updatable with Brad Dominy (Neucards)

The Shifting Privacy Left Podcast

I am delighted to welcome my next guest, Brad Dominy. Brad is a MacOS and iOS developer and Founder & Inventor of Neucards, a privacy-preserving app that enables secure shareable and updatable digital contacts. In this conversation, we delve into why personally managing our digital contacts has been so difficult and Brad's novel approach to securely manage our contacts, architected with privacy by design and default.

Contacts have always been the “junk drawer” of digital data, where people have information that they want to keep up-to-date, but are rarely able to based on current technology. The vCard standard is outdated, but is the only standard that works across iOS, Android, and Microsoft. It is still the most commonly used contact format, but lacks any capacity for updating contacts. Once someone exchanges their contact information with you, it then falls on you to keep that up-to-date. This is why Brad created Neucards: to gain the benefits of sharing information easily, privately (with E2EE) and receiving updates across all platforms.

Topics Covered:

• Why it is difficult to keep our digital contacts up-to-date across devices and platforms.
• Brad describes his career journey that inspired him to invent Neucards; the problems Neucards solves for; and why this became his passion project for over a decade
• Why companies haven’t innovated more in the digital contacts space
• The 3 main features that make Neucards different from other contact apps
• How Neucards enables you to share digital contacts data easily & securely
• Neucards' privacy by design and default approach to sharing and updating digital contacts
• How you can use NFC tap tags with Neucards to make the process of sharing digital contacts much easier
• Whether Neucards can solve the "New phone, who dis?" problem
• Whether we will see an update to the vCard standard or new standards for digital contacts
• Neucards' roadmap, including a 'mask communications' feature
• The importance of language; the difference between 'privacy-preserving' vs. 'privacy-enabling' architectural approaches

Resources Mentioned:

• Learn about Neucards
• Download the Neucards iOS app

Guest Info:

• Follow Brad on LinkedIn

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Chapters

1. S2E18: Making Digital Contact Cards Private, Shareable & Updatable with Brad Dominy (Neucards) (00:00:00)

2. Introducing Brad Dominy, MacOS and iOS developer and founder and inventor of Neucards (00:01:16)

3. Why it's so difficult to keep our digital contacts up-to-date across devices and platforms (00:02:38)

4. Brad describes his career journey that led him to inventing Neucards; the problems it solves for; and why this became his passion project for over a decade (00:06:43)

5. Brad describes the features that make Neucards different from other contacts apps out there (00:10:22)

6. How Neucards enables you to share digital contacts data easily & securely (00:13:47)

7. Neucards' privacy by design and default approach to sharing and updating digital contacts (00:17:06)

8. Brad explains how you can use NFC tap tags with Neucards to make the process of sharing digital contacts much easier (00:20:12)

9. Whether Neucards can solve the "New phone, who dis?" problem (00:24:20)

10. Whether we will see an update to the vCard standard or new standards for digital contacts (00:31:27)

11. Brad describes features on Neucards' product roadmap, including a 'mask communications' feature (00:33:16)

12. Brad makes a call for collaborators who want to help make digital contacts easier to share, update, and to keep private (00:40:53)